15 July 2021: Why Does the Cuomo Administration Keep Playing Games with COVID Death Counts?

Churchill: Another COVID-19 undercount? Does Cuomo ever learn?

Albany Times-Union columnist Chris Churchill reacts to Andrew M. Cuomo's latest attempted cover-up of COVID deaths in New York from the public. This time, it involves the state's total COVID death count figures, which Cuomo had previously claimed his administration was fully reporting. This excerpt picks up on that deceptive claim.

Here's the thing: If it hadn't been for all the nursing home dishonesty — which included scrubbing of honest data from an official Health Department report, stonewalling and threatening of lawmakers seeking the truth, and illegal dismissals of FOIL requests — maybe we could give the Cuomo administration the benefit of the doubt on this one.

But the Cuomo team has shown it doesn't deserve our trust. The governor and other state officials offered up blatantly misleading statistics on nursing home deaths, presumably to deflect criticism of a controversial state order requiring the facilities to accept COVID-19 patients.

"Why should we assume it's different now?" Hammond asked. "Why should we assume that they have a good faith reason for something that results in such a large undercount?"

We shouldn't. We can only view data from the Cuomo administration with skepticism. The governor's credibility, and that of his health department, has vanished, which is obviously a bad situation.

What happens if there's another public health crisis? Why would New Yorkers believe what they're told?

"You want to be able to trust the Health Department to give you straight information," Hammond said. "But if they're being deceptive about this" — the COVID-19 death total — "if makes you wonder about the accuracy of all means of other stuff."

Five months ago, in February, the governor finally admitted that the state had been not been counting residents who were sent to hospitals before they died in its nursing home tally. He talked about "creating the void" that allowed for misinformation to spread and rued that the failure had "created pain."

He also said that while fatalities in nursing homes had not been fully tallied, New Yorkers could have faith in the state's overall COVID-19 tally.

"Total death counts were always accurate," Cuomo said then.

Except they weren't. As before, Andrew M. Cuomo and his administration knew differently, but presented their undercount as the state's official figures. Because they believed it was to their advantage to hide the full extent of the state's COVID total death count from the public.

Churchill's column also contains additional commentary from the Empire Center's Bill Hammond (quoted above) and New York Department of Health spokesperson Jill Montag, which constitute original reporting. The latter presents the Cuomo administration's argument that because the CDC is reporting the figures the Cuomo administration's public health officials provided it, there has been no deception. Churchill however asks the question no one in the Cuomo administration appears willing to answer:

"There’s no such thing as ‘federal data’ as opposed to New York state data," contended Jill Montag, a health department spokesperson. "The numbers disseminated by the CDC come from New York state’s own daily reporting — it’s all New York state data and all public."

And this is the way Cuomo put it when asked by reporters Wednesday about the undercount: "We have always reported lab-tested COVID results," he said. "CDC asks for additional information on, I forget their terminology, possible or presumed COVID deaths, which we report to them and then they report."

But why must New Yorkers seeking full information go to the CDC? Why can't they get data from their own state?

If Andrew M. Cuomo or members of his administration believed reporting the data the CDC reports was to their advantage, they would do so. They don't. Their failure to do so is why they've been caught once again trying to fudge the numbers they present to the public and the media.