29 September 2021: Coalition of Groups Seek Public Data Team Cuomo Kept Hidden

Advocates and Journalists Push Hochul to Release Troves of Covid Data

A range of good government groups and journalists representing interests across the political spectrum are pushing replacement NY Governor Kathy Hochul to make the public data the Cuomo administration kept secret from the public available to the public.

A coalition of advocacy groups is pushing Governor Kathy Hochul to release over 100 datasets related to the coronavirus pandemic in New York that they believe the state is keeping. The groups say that information can be used by scientists, journalists, and advocates to better understand the virus, its impact on public health, and the state's response.

In a letter to Hochul, the coalition identified 123 datasets it said should be made available "without delay," of which only 14 have been published on the state's open data portal in a way that is easy to read and analyze. Another 64 sets have been published across various portals and websites in formats, like graphs, that cannot be broken down into more granular detail....

"Publishing COVID data in a tabular, downloadable, machine-readable format would help restore trust in state government and help researchers, journalists and the public to better understand the dire pandemic that has cost us loved ones and continues to upend everyday life," reads the letter, dated September 7 and signed by ten organizations “from across the political spectrum.” The advocates include good government groups like Reinvent Albany, Citizens Union, Common Cause NY, and the Empire Center, journalist associations like the New York News Publishers Association, national organizations like the National Freedom of Information Coalition, and civic data group BetaNYC.

The information being sought by the groups includes data that would have better informed the public and better directed the efforts of public health officials had the Cuomo administration made it available to capable data analysts outside its control. More importantly, the data belongs to the public, whose taxes paid for it to be collected in the first place.

But officials like Howard Zucker, Melissa DeRosa, and Andrew M. Cuomo chose to keep the public in the dark. In doing so, they made New York's experience during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 worse than it would have been had they not been seeking to cover-up the bad policy decisions they made, such as the tragedy that resulted from their deadly 25 March 2020 directive.

There's a reason why the timeline has featured a photo representing these three individuals at the top of the site since its launch, which we cropped to symbolically illustrate their roles in orchestrating Andrew M. Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals. The two you see are already out of power, with the third (of whom you only see part) soon to join them.