2 May 2021: Is the Cover-Up Worse Than the Crime?

Worse than the crime: Gov. Cuomo’s obfuscation of nursing home death numbers looks more egregious by the day

The editors of the New York Daily News are no paragons of moral integrity. They look at Governor Cuomo's cover-up of the consequences of his administration's deadly 25 March 2020 directive and conclude that the administration's efforts to conceal them are worse than the crime.

They're not. Just so we're clear, the crime in this case involves knowingly putting elderly nursing home residents at an elevated risk of exposure to a viral infection that inflames lung tissues, causing them to fill with fluid while leaving the victim starved of oxygen before killing them. Severe cases of COVID-19 have been described as feeling "like drowning on dry land". Without Governor Cuomo's deadly directive, hundreds if not thousands of more elderly New Yorkers in nursing homes would have escaped becoming infected with COVID-19 according to the best estimates we've seen to date. With Governor Cuomo's deadly directive, they died painfully.

And yet, the cover-up is very much part of the crime and has been so from the beginning, which not even the strange ethics of the Daily Times editorial board can question:

... it’s now clear beyond any doubt that Cuomo and his aides set out to prevent a timely, full and honest accounting of those deaths. Deep shame on him and them.

The New York Times’ discovery of drafted but never-released reports and its interviews with state health officials reveals that, contrary to claims made throughout last year as Cuomo and his aides stonewalled the public, Dr. Howard Zucker and DOH staff didn’t need more time to count the deaths. They had a clear sense of the much-higher-than-initially-reported nursing home death toll way back in June — and kept it close to the vest until forced to come clean by a lawsuit.

The deception makes all the more galling the fact that a July 8, 2020, Health Department report, which had been aggressively massaged by Cuomo’s aides, included an obviously inaccurate data point stating New York had a lower percentage of COVID nursing home deaths as a share of all COVID deaths than all but four other states. Cuomo repeated that defensive claim with pride over and over, and it found its way into his memoir about the pandemic published last October.

Senior Cuomo aides insist they were simply being zealous about accuracy. The claim fails the smell test.

The timeline captures the events cited by the Daily News editors here. We do note one date correction needs to be made in editorial: the NY DOH's report was published two days earlier than the editors indicated, on 6 July 2020.