1 May 2021: Cuomo Defends Misrepresenting Full Extent of COVID Nursing Home Deaths

COVID-19: Cuomo Defends Aides' Miscounting Nursing Home Deaths, Calling It 'Political Football'

Although the Cuomo administration's cover-up of the full extent of COVID-related deaths among New York nursing home residents began in April 2020, Governor Cuomo is blaming "political football" for his and his staff's decisions to conceal the information they were routinely collecting.

The following excerpt from this report captures the Governor's latest attempts to muddy the water on the scandal with more extensive coverage of his comments at a 30 April 2021 publicity event in Buffalo, NY:

“Let’s talk some facts about what was happening with nursing homes,” Cuomo said following a COVID-19 briefing in Buffalo on Thursday, April 29. “That became highly politicized between the federal government and state governments.

“I was critical of the federal government for not doing enough on COVID, and the federal government was blaming Democratic states for not handling it, so it was highly political,” he added. "We were in the middle of a presidential campaign and the president was blaming Democratic governors and pointing to nursing homes as the problem, blaming them.”

“If a person was in a nursing home for a week, then was sent to a hospital and died within one day of getting in there, do we count it as a nursing home death? What if it’s seven days later? Is that a hospital death or a nursing home death,” he said. “It’s dancing on the head of a pin.

“Some (states) counted just the number of deaths in nursing homes, some counted people who were in nursing homes and sent to the hospital and later died in the hospital,” Cuomo noted. “The number of nursing home deaths is hard to count because all states counted it differently.”...

“So it started as a political football, and then we wanted to make sure the number was accurate, but many different states counted in many different ways, and we didn't want an inaccurate number,” he said. “Then the Department of Justice starts a political investigation and that ‘freezes the situation’ because lawyers said we have to be very careful.”...

“The total number is what we put out there every day. Then it got turned into a political game of ‘oh let’s count how many (died) in nursing homes versus how many were in a hospital, and there are all sorts of questions and variables,” he said.

“Today, with retrospect, when you go back and find states have all different ways of counting, but the only number that matters is the total number of deaths.”

Given the detailed data New York's Department of Health began routinely collecting every day from 18 April 2020, and its efforts to compile similar data for the months preceding that date, the Cuomo administration was more than capable of fully reporting its data using the standards the federal government health agencies began requiring in mid-May 2020. That was roughly three months before the Trump DOJ first requested New York's public data on COVID nursing home resident deaths.

Governor Cuomo and his administration chose to not report that information in that standardized system for the period in which his administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive was in effect.

We therefore find Governor Cuomo's odd defense of his administration's choice to mislead the public, state lawmakers, the media, watchdog organizations, and federal officials on the basis of "political football" does not past muster as either a reasonable or coherent explanation for its acknowledged cover-up.