21 December 2021: AP Reflects on the Fall of Andrew M. Cuomo

2021 Notebook: The scandals that took down Andrew Cuomo

The Associated Press' Albany correspondent Marina Villeneuve recaps the AP's coverage of Andrew M. Cuomo's scandals in this report. The AP contributed original reporting that confirmed Cuomo's administration was covering up the full extent of COVID deaths among nursing home residents during the time when its deadly 25 March 2020 directive that forced nursing homes to blindly admit COVID patients being discharged from hospitals to free up their bed space was in effect. The following excerpt focuses on that aspect of the recap:

THE NURSING HOMES: At the start of the pandemic in 2020, I and other reporters were asking a lot of questions about how COVID was impacting nursing homes, and the Cuomo administration would at times argue that releasing the data would jeopardize patients’ privacy. The governor also claimed that New York’s nursing homes were much less badly hit than other states, but he based that on partial data. And as the data came in — through my own reporting and others’ reporting as well — we learned that the administration wasn’t providing the full picture and was only reporting some deaths ... to make it seem that there weren’t as many people dying of COVID in nursing homes. And there remain a lot of questions about whether the state could have done more to prevent deaths, whether any policies made outbreaks worse and what lessons there are going forward.

It felt pretty shocking because nursing home outbreaks were such a serious crisis, and you couldn’t really imagine that the approach of a government would be to mask how bad outbreaks were. So yeah, I guess it was shocking for me. I think for some other journalists who have been around longer covering the governor, they were aware of his reputation, or this New York style of sort of exaggeration, but it was shocking, for sure.

Early this year, the Attorney General’s Office released this big and thorough investigation that really confirmed what I and others at AP had pieced together. We did a lot of just calling up nursing homes and asking how many deaths there had been, or how many infections. And there would always be a lot of discrepancies between the federal data in the state data. There was a lot of trying to ask the health department about the reasons for those gaps or those discrepancies. And I did a story this summer just looking at how up until just before the governor resigned, New York was still reporting this lower, statewide death toll that did not include confirmed COVID deaths at people’s homes. It was only including confirmed COVID deaths at hospitals. And that’s something that the new governor changed on day one.

That was very solid, well done journalism. It should also never have been necessary had the Cuomo administration not sought to cover-up the full extent of the death toll to which the resigned-in-disgrace governor's policies contributed.