27 April 2021: Families of Cuomo COVID Nursing Home Victims Want Answers, Accountability

Nursing home families still in the dark after Gov. Cuomo’s COVID disaster

This op-ed article is by Daniel and Peter Arbeeny, whose father Norman died in a Brooklyn nursing home while the Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive was in effect.

That story and their fight for answers appears several times within the timeline. In this opinion piece, after describing several incidents involving Governor Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals they describe as worthy of criminal investigation, they take New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli to the woodshed over his failure to use the power of his office to meaningfully participate, calling him "missing in action":

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli is independently elected and has the authority to audit and hold accountable state and local government. His mission is transparency and to seek the truth wherever it leads. Unfortunately, DiNapoli has declined to assert this power during the pandemic. In fact, he has conducted not one audit of any substantive COVID-related issue, let alone of the nursing home scandal that resulted in the deaths of thousands of New Yorkers.

The Arbeeny brothers describe what DiNapoli could be investigating if hadn't chosen to pass the buck on participating:

If DiNapoli wants to get in the game and do his job to seek the truth, he needs to probe the origins of the March 25, 2020, nursing home order, including all communications of outside parties who took part. He also needs to uncover whether the 600 nursing homes were equipped to accept COVID-positive patients and, if not, why.

We need to know who tallied the state Department of Health’s nursing home COVID death count data, and exactly what the agency knew when. We also need the number of nursing home discharges who, like our father, caught COVID in a nursing home but later died at home.

Along the way, DiNapoli should look into the credible claims that Cuomo lined up COVID testing for family and other connected people during the initial months of the pandemic. The taxpayers deserve to know these names.

The Cuomo administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive is estimated to have cost the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of more elderly New Yorkers than would have died from COVID-19 had the directive never been issued.