23 August 2021: Cuomo Leaving NY DOH Staffing Mess Behind

Cuomo leaves Hochul with staff crisis at Health Department amid COVID

In a sign of how Andrew M. Cuomo's multiple scandals negatively impacted his ability to perform in office, New York's incoming replacement governor Kathy Hochul is inheriting a major staff crisis at the New York Department of Health.

Disgraced outgoing Gov. Andrew Cuomo is saddling successor Kathy Hochul with a major staffing crisis at the state Health Department when she takes the reins Tuesday, personnel records obtained by The Post reveal.

The records that show 58 DOH employees who made more than $100,000 — including those in top policy positions and scientists tasked with fighting the unrelenting COVID-19 crisis — have fled the agency from Jan. 1 through Aug. 11 this year.

Two more top health officials have submitted resignations since then, bringing the total to 60. One of them is Richard Becker, the governor’s deputy secretary for health and human services who was hired last August.

“Hochul has been handed a depleted and demoralized health department. It’s going to be Hochul’s problem to rebuild DOH,” one former veteran Health Department official told The Post.

The report notes that current department head Howard Zucker's ethical problems and involvement in Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals may be a contributing factor in the departures of senior staff:

Zucker signed off on the controversial DOH directive during the early days of the pandemic that ordered nursing homes to take in recovering COVID-19 patients from hospitals without prior testing, which critics claimed contributed to the spread of infections and deaths among the elderly in those facilities. Cuomo and Zucker defended the policy, which was later rescinded.

Zucker and DOH also was implicated in Cuomo’s cover up of the true number of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes and for attempting to absolve the administration of wrongdoing in an in-house report issued last year....

More than 54,000 people have died of COVID-19 in New York State, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. About 16,000 fatalities were residents in nursing homes and other adult care facilities.

The report does not mention the DOH's role in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic in New York under Zucker in diverting scarce DOH resources to provide VIP priority care and testing for Andrew M. Cuomo's family members, such as CNN host Chris Cuomo, and other politically-connected associates of the disgraced and soon-to-be former governor.