25 August 2021: Opinion - Cuomo Still Needs to Answer for COVID Nursing Home Deaths

Cuomo says farewell, but he should still answer for New York’s COVID nursing home calamity (opinion)

SILive columnist Tom Wrobleski recaps Andrew M. Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals in calling for accountability. This is a lengthy excerpt, because it deserves to be read that way:

Cuomo in his farewell aria on Monday said that New York had “faced up to the facts” when dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. We were able to drive down infection rates while other states played politics, he said.

But Cuomo has never faced up to the facts when it comes to the directive issued by his Health Department on March 25, 2020 that forced nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients from hospitals.

The mandate stipulated that the nursing homes couldn’t even ask the COVID status of any incoming patient.

The directive put the most vulnerable COVID patients into the most perilous environment possible. It put COVID sufferers, nursing home residents and staffers at terrible risk.

Attorney General Letitia James in January issued a report that said the Cuomo administration had undercounted the number of COVID deaths in nursing homes by as much as half.

The report said that the March 25 directive may have increased the death count.

Cuomo’s response? People died, the governor thundered. Who cares where they died? They died.

The families cared a lot.

And it turns out that Cuomo may have cared where people died as well, but for a different reason.

Earlier, Cuomo and his top staffers had been lashed for withholding information from the U.S. Justice Department about COVID deaths in nursing homes. They were afraid that the information would be politically weaponized by then-President Donald Trump.

Hogwash. Cuomo knew the nursing home news was bad for him. He knew that it would tarnish the halo he’d been given by the media for his “straight-talk” daily updates during the pandemic.

So the nursing home information was hidden for as long as possible, until even Cuomo’s fellow Democrats were calling him out.

Just because Cuomo has resigned doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t be held accountable for what happened in state nursing homes.

The timeline traces the beginning of Cuomo's cover-up of the full extent of COVID deaths among NY nursing home residents to April 2020. The Trump DOJ first requested COVID death data for New York's nursing homes on 26 August 2020.

By that time, senior Cuomo administration officials had been tampering with the reporting of the state's public data on the full extent of COVID-related nursing home deaths for months, most notably editing a state NYDOH report in July 2020 to reduce its count of deaths in order to absolve themselves of responsibility for the excess COVID deaths that resulted from Governor Andrew M. Cuomo's and Health Commissioner Howard Zucker's deadly 25 March 2020 directive.

There's a lot of answering that needs to be done for Andrew M. Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals. Much of it by the state officials who developed, implemented, and enforced the policies that made COVID deadlier in New York than it would have been without them.