25 August 2021: How NY's Official State Count of COVID Deaths Changed

State Health Dept. finally reports New York’s true COVID death toll

This report describes how New York's official number of deaths attributed to COVID-19 changed after Governor Kathy Hochul ditched the Cuomo administration's deceptive practices in reporting the public data:

The new state figures show the number COVID-related deaths in New York State as of Tuesday totaled 55,395.

It’s a significant jump from the 43,415 that would have been reported under the old system, which only tallied deaths in hospitals, nursing homes and adult care facilities.

The Cuomo administration’s decision to only release those partial tallies in its daily public summaries of COVID-19 data had come under increasing fire in recent weeks.

Those reports did not include New Yorkers who died from the pandemic at home, or in jails or prisons or in other non-hospital settings, or doing the early days of the pandemic when testing was not available, providing an incomplete picture of the true toll COVID-19 took on the Empire State.

However, state officials did quietly provide the total count to the federal authorities at the CDC, which began providing them in its own datasets — raising rounds of questions about the information published locally by the Cuomo administration.

The report recognizes the Cuomo administration's tactics to underreport the number of COVID deaths in New York is similar to those they used to cover-up the full extent of COVID deaths at NY nursing homes:

The Cuomo administration used similar tactics to make the number of nursing home deaths caused by the coronavirus appear dramatically smaller, tallying just those residents who died in nursing homes and not those who were taken to the hospital before passing away.

It only released the true figures after Attorney General Letitia James released a damning report that highlighted the vast discrepancies between the figures published by the Cuomo administration and information tallied by compiling death certificates.

The report also indicates Hochul plans to identify and sack state officials involved in Andrew M. Cuomo's COVID deaths underreporting and cover-up scandals.