26 October 2021: Hochul's Health Department Still Covering Up COVID Nursing Home Deaths

Hochul’s Health Dept. continues Cuomo-era stall in in releasing nursing-home COVID info

This report indicates replacement NY Governor Kathy Hochul isn't taking Andrew M. Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandal seriously enough to address one of its major components: the Cuomo administration's acknowledged cover-up.

Despite Gov. Kathy Hochul’s promises of transparency, the state Health Department continues responding to requests for pandemic data with stalling tactics that became notorious during the Cuomo administration.

In one striking example, the department recently responded to the Empire Center’s request for updated nursing-home fatality data with the same form letter — and the same invalid excuse for delay — that it used last year as part of what came to be recognized as a coverup.

In its letter of Sept. 22, 2021, the department said it couldn’t produce the data until Nov. 29 — five months after the original request — “because a diligent search for responsive records is still being conducted.”

That’s exactly the same boilerplate explanation that it gave for withholding nursing-home data from the Empire Center in August 2020, and the claim was specious in both cases.

In reality, the requested records were readily findable in the department’s Health Emergency Response Data System, or HERDS, which has been collecting daily reports from nursing homes since early in the pandemic.

This is a major black eye for replacement NY Governor Kathy Hochul. It screams she has made no progress in addressing the New York Health Department's role in the Cuomo administration's cover-up of the excess deaths that resulted from its deadly 25 March 2020 directive that forced nursing homes to blindly admit COVID patients being dumped out of New York hospitals to free up their bed space.

Her choice to place her primary focus on addressing Cuomo's sexual harassment scandals at the expense of the COVID nursing home deaths scandals is consistent with the hypothesis that the sexual harassment allegations were promoted as a way to minimize the damage to the state's Democratic Party from the much larger COVID nursing home deaths scandals. In that light, it was a political path of expediency for removing Cuomo from office.