9 April 2021: NY Nursing Home Coverup "Even Worse Than We Knew"

Team Cuomo’s nursing-home coverup was even worse than we knew

The New York Post is the newspaper that originally broke the story of COVID deaths taking place in New York's nursing homes as a consequence of the Cuomo administration's 25 March 2020 directive and has been hammering away at the Cuomo administration and state officials to get the full story. So the Post's editors already knew quite a lot about Team Cuomo's coverup.

Then they found out what Team Cuomo and state public health officials knew and when they knew it:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s coverup of nursing-home COVID deaths was even worse than we’d thought: It turns out his Department of Health started collecting the key data a full year ago — even as it kept the info secret in defiance of lawmakers’ rights as well as the Freedom of Information Law.

A DOH memo obtained by The Post shows the department began ordering care homes to report both in-home and in-hospital deaths of residents last April. Yet for nine months Team Cuomo refused to share it, with Health Commissioner Howard Zucker insulting legislators with bogus claims the info wasn’t accurate enough to release and other staffers falsely claiming they couldn’t compile the info to comply with FOIL requests from the Empire Center.

In January, Attorney General Tish James finally called out the clear signs that total deaths were half again what Team Cuomo was pretending — and only then did DOH release the true tally.

The conspiracy was all about hiding the evidence of a deadly scandal: Zucker’s March 25, 2020, order forced homes to admit COVID-contagious patients without even testing them. That clearly led to needless deaths, as the Empire Center’s analysis revealed once it finally had the data.

Governor Cuomo's nursing home scandals did not happen in a vacuum, and were not solely the product of one man's evil choices. It took a lot of teamwork to implement and enforce the policies that contributed to the premature deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of New York nursing home residents. It also took teamwork to cover up the full extent of those deaths for so long from state lawmakers, federal officials, and the public.

Many of those offenses are crimes. Will there ever be a serious reckoning for Team Cuomo?