2 November 2020: Editorial - Time for Team Cuomo's 'Data Dodge' to End

Cuomo’s data dodge: The governor needs to share New York’s actual nursing home COVID-19 death total

The editorial board of the New York Daily News opens up about their frustration with the Cuomo administration's stonewalling efforts.

Gov. Cuomo and the state Health Department are still failing to deliver on months' old promises to release the true tally of nursing home residents killed by COVID. The fact that some seeking the data have political motives is no excuse for stonewalling.

The official nursing home toll stands near 6,700 New Yorkers. But that only includes residents who died inside nursing homes, not the potentially thousands more who died after being transferred to hospitals.

The missing figures have not made legitimate questions disappear. Instead, the stalling only damages the credibility Cuomo and state health officials earned by capably handling the virus. Cuomo’s mantra-like repetition that New York ranks low among states in nursing home deaths as a share of total deaths, when he well knows that a fuller death count could change that statistic, is disappointingly disingenuous.