19 March 2021: Standard Operating Procedure for Team Cuomo

NY officials covered up more than just nursing-home deaths

We joked in our roundup of Cuomoland scandal news on 18 March 2021 that all the scandals were changing how Governor Cuomo does his job, "except for coverups, which which would appear to be a standard operating practice."

If you go by this op-ed by nonpartisan Empire Center for Public Policy's CEO Tim Hoefer, we were almost perfectly on target with that description. Here's an excerpt:

Gov. Cuomo's coverup of nursing-home deaths revealed the stunning lengths to which he and his staff go to keep damning information from the public. But few New Yorkers may realize that such behavior is actually standard operating procedure throughout much of New York government.

Hoeffer goes on to recount the Empire Center's role in suing various government transportation agencies in New York for information that ultimately led to criminal charges and convictions on the part of government officials. The officials who refused to comply with lawful requests for public data were covering up their misdeeds.

That brings us back to Team Cuomo's stonewalling in releasing public data for COVID nursing home deaths.

But the worst, and now most famous, New York government data coverup came when Cuomo's Department of Health asked New Yorkers to rely on its own "reporting" on COVID nursing-home deaths. We (and others) asked for the full data, including those who died after being sent to hospitals, but Team Cuomo stonewalled — never mind that the numbers were critical to learn how best to deal with the virus.

Not until Attorney General Letitia James revealed in January that DOH may have understated those deaths by nearly 50 percent did a court rule on the Empire Center’s lawsuit and order the full numbers released, forcing Cuomo & Co. finally to come clean. Yet even this week, as our Bill Hammond reports, the governor's office is again delaying, for a third time, release of the records of its vaccine-review panel.

We'll know soon if the administration’s nursing-home shenanigans warrant criminal charges, pending the outcome of various investigations. But it's already clear Team Cuomo works hard to keep the public in the dark, despite the governor's pledge to run the most transparent administration in history. It's equally clear that the public suffers greatly as a result.

Team Cuomo doesn't own that information; it belongs to the public. If that information held positive news for the Cuomo administration, why wouldn't they put it out on demand?