Sunday, July 11, 2021

11 July 2021: Explaining Andrew Cuomo's Nursing Home Scandals

Churchill: Explaining Andrew Cuomo's nursing home scandal

Albany Times-Union columnist Chris Churchill devoted part of a recent newsletter to explaining Andrew M. Cuomo's nursing home scandal to a Cuomo supporter. Here's the full portion of that content:

On another topic, Janice in Troy thinks I am a bit too hard on Andrew Cuomo, particularly on the topic of nursing homes. She writes:

"I have a question, not just for you, but for everyone who has faulted him for his role in the nursing home 'scandal': Where were those with COVID-19 supposed to go? They certainly couldn’t stay indefinitely in hospitals — rooms there were in short supply, if you recall ... For a long time, I’ve haven’t understood this scenario. Hopefully, you can point out what the solution(s) should have been under such circumstances."

That's a reference to the controversial Department of Health order, issued on March 25 last year, which required nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients and forbid even testing them. Studies have concluded that the order contributed to deaths.

First, I'd note that downstate COVID-19 patients could have been moved to the U.S.N.S. Comfort or the hospital built inside the Javits Center, which sat underutilized even when the pandemic was most severe. But I've also written that the order may have seemed justifiable at the time, given the extreme circumstances New York was anticipating at the apex of the crisis.

While it was wrong, certainly, to ignore nursing homes concerned about the order, it was inexcusable for Cuomo to subsequently hide the full number of nursing home deaths. The cover-up, in other words, was arguably worse than the original error, and it suggested Cuomo himself thought that the order, along with the refusal to abandon it sooner, was a mistake grave enough to damage his reputation.

Don't forget the $5.1 million book deal, which the governor may have been trying to protect, along with the removal of accurate data on nursing-home deaths from a state report, the immunity from lawsuits granted to nursing home owners, the stonewalling of the Legislature and the threats to destroy critics.

All and all, it really is a scandal worthy of an ongoing federal investigation — and an indictment of the governor's character.

Indeed it is. Do Andrew M. Cuomo's political supporters recognize what it is they are endorsing?

On a separate note, in addition to the options of placing COVID-19 patients on the U.S. Navy's Comfort hospital ship or at the 1,000 bed emergency field hospital built in the Javits Center, the Cuomo administration could have designated certain nursing homes as facilities for COVID-19 patients - a move they didn't take until November 2020. Here's the related entry from the timeline:

The most likely explanation for why the Cuomo administration kept the action quiet in November 2020 because they didn't want to draw attention to the fact they had not considered that option in March and April 2020 when they made much more disastrous choices.

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