26 February 2021: First Draft of Governor Cuomo's Political Obituary

The meteoric rise and rapid collapse of Andrew Cuomo: A tragedy of his own making

Columnist Mike Kelly's opinion piece is the first obituary we've seen for Governor Cuomo's political career. Here's an excerpt:

Let's start with Cuomo's biggest mistake — his inexplicable decision not to properly report on nursing home patients in New York who died from COVID-19.

The mistake is multi-faceted. And so is Cuomo's own failure to face it.

First, Cuomo's administration embraced a completely ridiculous policy of allowing elderly nursing home patients who had been hospitalized with COVID-19 to return to their nursing homes and the vulnerable population there. Infections spread. Nursing home deaths skyrocketed.

Cuomo's critics raised concerns at the time. So did doctors, nurses — even relatives who watched their elderly parents die.

But the swaggering Cuomo routinely dismissed these questions, claiming they were meaningless tirades from Trump supporters or two-bit stories in right-wing media. The truth is that the criticism was entirely valid.

We think Kelly's premature obituary errs in identifying the coverup of COVID-19 nursing home deaths as Governor Cuomo's biggest mistake. Governor Cuomo's biggest mistake was the panicked decision to force New York's nursing homes to blindly admit COVID-19 patients. Everything he and members of his administration have done in the months since has been aimed at avoiding responsibility for the consequences of that disastrous policy choice.