5 March 2021: Team Cuomo Members Doctored NY DOH Report To Hide Extent of COVID Nursing Home Deaths

Cuomo Advisers Altered Report on Covid-19 Nursing-Home Deaths

This is a bombshell report. It confirms the Cuomo administration cooked the numbers presented in the New York Department of Health's 6 July 2020 report to purposefully conceal the full extend of COVID-19 deaths among nursing home residents.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's top advisers successfully pushed state health officials to strip a public report of data showing that more nursing-home residents had died of Covid-19 than the administration had acknowledged, according to people with knowledge of the report's production.

The July report, which examined the factors that led to the spread of the virus in nursing homes, focused only on residents who died inside long-term-care facilities, leaving out those who had died in hospitals after becoming sick in nursing homes. As a result, the report said 6,432 nursing-home residents had died—a significant undercount of the death toll attributed to the state's most vulnerable population, the people said. The initial version of the report said nearly 10,000 nursing-home residents had died in New York by July last year, one of the people said.

The changes Mr. Cuomo's aides and health officials made to the nursing-home report, which haven't been previously disclosed, reveal that the state possessed a fuller accounting of out-of-facility nursing-home deaths as early as the summer. The Health Department resisted calls by state and federal lawmakers, media outlets and others to release the data for another eight months.

Much of the Wall Street Journal's article is behind a paywall. Zerohedge has a good summary of its full content.

The altered report was used by Governor Cuomo and members of his administration to support to fully absolve themselves of all blame for COVID-19 deaths among nursing home residents in the state. This report confirms both they had a largely complete count at the time of the report's production and that the "scientifically supported" claims they subsequently championed were false.

Because of the Cuomo administration's alterations, the New York Department of Health's 6 July 2020 report violates several items on the checklist for detecting junk science. It qualifies as pseudoscience.

Cuomo Aides Rewrote Nursing Home Report to Hide Higher Death Toll

This New York Times article reports the Cuomo administration's coverup of the full extent of COVID-19 deaths among nursing home residents began months before the New York Department of Health's 6 July 2020 report.

After the state attorney general revealed earlier this year that thousands of deaths of nursing home residents had been undercounted, Mr. Cuomo finally released the complete data, saying he had withheld it out of concern that the Trump administration might pursue a politically motivated inquiry into the state's handling of the outbreak in nursing homes.

But Mr. Cuomo and his aides actually began concealing the numbers months earlier, as his aides were battling their own top health officials, and well before requests for data arrived from federal authorities, according to documents and interviews with six people with direct knowledge of the discussions, who requested anonymity to describe the closed-door debates.

Shortly after this revelation, the NYT journalists identify which Cuomo administration officials were involved and belatedly validate our analysis from 12 May 2020, which appears at the top of this now very long post.

The aides who were involved in changing the report included Melissa DeRosa, the governor's top aide; Linda Lacewell, the head of the state's Department of Financial Services; and Jim Malatras, a former top adviser to Mr. Cuomo brought back to work on the pandemic. None had public health expertise.

In response to a detailed list of questions from The Times sent on Tuesday, the governor's office responded with a statement Thursday night from Beth Garvey, a special counsel, who said "the out-of-facility data was omitted after D.O.H. could not confirm it had been adequately verified." She added that the additional data did not change the conclusion of the report.

The tension over the death count dated to the early weeks of the pandemic when Mr. Cuomo issued an order preventing nursing homes from turning away people discharged from the hospital after being treated for Covid-19. The order was similar to ones issued in other states aimed at preventing hospitals from becoming overwhelmed.

Along with New York, just three other states sustained such a policy for a significant period of time: Michigan, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. There are calls in each for independent investigations of the role these policies had in contributing to nursing home resident deaths. One more state, California, implemented a similar policy at the same time these states did, but rescinded it within a few days. Of these states, only California avoided having excessive deaths among nursing home residents in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. None of the other states governments are known to have engaged in covering up the extent of COVID-19 deaths among nursing home residents to anywhere near the extent that happened in New York.

The article describes what data Cuomo administration officials changed in the report:

The Health Department worked on the report with McKinsey, a consulting firm hired by Mr. Cuomo to help with the pandemic response. The chart they created compared nursing home deaths in New York with other states. New York's total of 9,250 deaths far exceeded that of the next-highest state, New Jersey, which had 6,150 at the time.

Cuomo official Malatras appears to throw cohorts under bus in nursing home denial

This report narrows in on which Cuomo administration officials doctored the New York Department of Health's 6 July 2020 report on COVID-19 deaths at New York nursing homes:

A member of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's COVID-19 task force on Friday denied any role in changing a Department of Health report to cover up the state's true nursing home death toll from the coronavirus.

The assertion by SUNY Chancellor Jim Malatras appeared to place blame for the undercount on officials including Cuomo's embattled top aide, Melissa DeRosa, Health Commissioner Howard Zucker and Linda Lacewell, superintendent of the state Department of Financial Services.

Malatras and the other three were all identified by the Wall Street Journal as being among the Cuomo advisers who reviewed and requested changes to the July 6 report, which upon release said that 6,432 nursing-home residents had died of COVID-19.

How many other Cuomo administration officials will turn on their peers before the scandal is over?