28 April 2021: Confirmed - Team Cuomo Cover-up of NY Nursing Home COVID Deaths Began in April 2020

Cuomo Aides Spent Months Hiding Nursing Home Death Toll

This report New York Times validates the analysis of events we've put together in the timeline, where we had already traced the beginning of Team Cuomo's cover-up of the full extent of COVID-19 deaths among New York nursing home residents to April 2020. Beyond that, the Times describes several documents Cuomo administration officials blocked from either becoming public or communicated with state legislators.

The effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office to obscure the pandemic death toll in New York nursing homes was far greater than previously known, with aides repeatedly overruling state health officials over a span of at least five months, according to interviews and newly unearthed documents.

Mr. Cuomo’s most senior aides engaged in a sustained effort to prevent the state’s own health officials, including the commissioner, Howard Zucker, from releasing the true death toll to the public or sharing it with state lawmakers, these interviews and documents showed.

A scientific paper, which incorporated the data, was never published. An audit of the numbers by a top Cuomo aide was finished months before it became publicly known. Two letters, drafted by the Health Department and meant for state legislators, were never sent.

The actions coincided with the period in which Mr. Cuomo was pitching and then writing a book on the pandemic, with the assistance of his top aide, Melissa DeRosa, and others.

But wait, there's more!

The full data on nursing home deaths was not released until this year, after a report by the state attorney general in late January found that the official tally might have undercounted the true toll by as much as 50 percent.

That was something Mr. Cuomo’s aides had known since the previous spring, The New York Times found.

Related events from the timeline:

• 25 March 2020: A Deadly Directive Is Issued - The implementation of this policy is why the Cuomo administration needed to cover up the full extent of COVID deaths among NY nursing home residents.
• 2 April 2020: Hospital Lobby Scores Legal Immunity from COVID Deaths - We think this act technically marks the beginning of the Cuomo administration's cover-up. After the deadly 25 March 2020 directive was issued, a powerful hospital and nursing home operator lobby used it for leverage to get Governor Cuomo to agree to give them legal immunity for COVID deaths among their patients and residents. Without it, they would have had much more incentive to speak up about the fatal consequences of the directive.
• 8 April 2020: New York DOH Won't Release COVID Nursing Home Death Data - This is one of the first reports of the Cuomo administration's stonewalling to prevent the public, the media, watchdog groups, state lawmakers, and federal officials from learning the full extent of COVID deaths during the period the deadly directive was in effect.
• 18 April 2020: NY DOH's Initiates Systematic Collection of COVID Death Data for Nursing Home Residents - This date marks the point from which New York's Department of Health began systematically collecting nursing home death data on a daily basis. Combined with its efforts to collect the data in the period preceding its regular data collection, it is clear the Cuomo administration had access to all this information for months.
• 5 July 2020: Top Cuomo Staffer Edits His Pandemic "Leadership" Book, NY DOH Nursing Home Report - This report confirms the same aides who Governor Cuomo assigned to edit his estimated $4 million pandemic "leadership" book were also editing the New York Department of Health's report on NY nursing home resident deaths, which were greatly understated in both documents.
• 28 January 2021: NY AG Confirms Team Cuomo Hiding Extent of COVID Deaths in Nursing Homes - "Tish" James' report marks the beginning of the end of what had been Team Cuomo's successful cover-up of the extent of COVID nursing home resident deaths.
• 3 February 2021: Judge Rules Against Team Cuomo Nursing Home Death Data Stonewall - This ruling forced the Cuomo administration to finally release much of the information they had been stonewalling in releasing for months. It was released within a matter of days after this point to comply with the ruling.
• 11 February 2021: Team Cuomo Claims They Hid Data to Avoid Trump DOJ - This date marks the end of the Cuomo administration's cover-up, as Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa acknowledged she and other members of the administration had been deliberately misleading state lawmakers about the number of COVID deaths among NY nursing home residents. Her claim that it was to avoid being persecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice under President Trump has now been confirmed as fully false, since the cover-up began months before the DOJ ever requested any of the data.

If the New York Assembly was serious about its impeachment probe, it has more than sufficient probable cause supported by well-established documentation and evidence based on the Cuomo administration's COVID cover-up to impeach Governor Cuomo today. If they were serious, they would vote to launch a full impeachment trial in the New York state senate on that basis now, while continuing their other probes of Governor Cuomo's alleged misconduct in office.