15 March 2022: NY State Comptroller Confirms Cuomo's Cover-Up of COVID Nursing Home Deaths

Health Agency Under Cuomo ‘Misled the Public’ on Nursing Home Deaths

This report may be one of the first times the New York Times has broken a story related to Andrew M. Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals. In this case, the NYT reports on the New York's State Comptroller's audit of New York's COVID nursing home deaths records, which confirms Cuomo's administration exerted influence to conceal the full extent of COVID deaths that occurred during the period Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive was in effect. Here's the meat of the story:

The administration of former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo failed to publicly account for the deaths of about 4,100 nursing home residents in New York during the pandemic, according to an audit released on Tuesday by the state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli.

The audit found that Health Department officials at times underreported the full death toll by as much as 50 percent from April 2020 to February 2021, as Mr. Cuomo faced increasing scrutiny over whether his administration had intentionally concealed the actual number of deaths.

The 41-page report concluded that the Health Department often acquiesced to the narrative Mr. Cuomo and his top officials wanted to promote during the pandemic, sometimes failing to meet its “ethical” and “moral” imperatives to act transparently.

“Our audit findings are extremely troubling,” Mr. DiNapoli said in a statement. “The public was misled by those at the highest level of state government through distortion and suppression of the facts when New Yorkers deserved the truth.”

But there are still problems:

Health officials did not provide auditors with a breakdown by name of the nursing home residents who died from Covid, according to Mr. DiNapoli’s office, and the actual number of nursing home residents who died is still uncertain.

The audit marks the third state inquiry to corroborate how Mr. Cuomo’s administration significantly downplayed the number of nursing home deaths during the pandemic. Those efforts coincided with Mr. Cuomo’s attempts to elevate his public image at the height of his national popularity in 2020, including through daily televised briefings and the publication of a book that burnished his response to the pandemic.

For their part, officials at New York's Department of Health are attempting to lay the full blame for the cover-up of the full extent of COVID deaths at New York's nursing homes on Andrew M. Cuomo and top officials in his administration:

In a 12-page rebuttal to the report’s findings, the Health Department forcefully pushed back against conflating the Cuomo administration’s issues with transparency with the work of the department’s staff and the manner in which they use public health data.

“Whatever criticisms may now be directed at the prior administration relating to issues of transparency, or the particular categories of information that were publicly disclosed, those ultimately were matters for the executive chamber of the prior administration and not department personnel,” wrote Kristin M. Proud, the department’s acting executive deputy commissioner.

Unlike the immersive coverage it provided for covered Andrew M. Cuomo's sexual harassment scandals, this report was written by just one employee of the NYT's reporting staff. Serious reporting on Cuomo's COVID nursing home deaths scandals remains a low priority affair at the newspaper.