16 March 2022: Opinion - Nursing Home Audit Highlights Cuomo Pandemic Failures

Churchill: Nursing home audit highlights Cuomo failures

In this opinion piece, Albany Times-Union columnist Chris Churchill describes the new and damning information about Andrew M. Cuomo's pandemic leadership that's contained in NY state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli's audit report of COVID nursing home deaths in New York during the coronavirus pandemic.

The DiNapoli audit, released Tuesday, is a detailed reminder of the awful behavior and another rebuttal to Team Cuomo claims that the former governor was undone by political subterfuge. Read the report and the real reasons for Cuomo's downfall become clear.

But the audit is more than just a reminder of an old scandal. It breaks ground in highlighting how New York was poorly prepared for the pandemic, especially in regard to nursing homes, and how badly the state responded when COVID-19 arrived.

Among other findings, the report details poor Heath Department oversight of nursing home conditions and finds that lines of coordination with local health officials were often broken. It also found that New York significantly trailed other states in developing strategies to keep the virus out of nursing homes.

The report also says this: "The department was plagued by a threatening environment of intimidation, closed ranks, and lack of commitment to openness — at the expense of the public's trust."

The audit doesn't just highlight the Cuomo administration's dishonesty, then. It shows its incompetence.

The timing for the former governor is lousy, given that he only recently launched a return to public life. In fact, a new Cuomo ad attempts to portray the Democrat as an effective commander who "led this nation through the frightening COVID-19 crisis."

The DiNapoli audit renders that already laughable claim ludicrous, which helps explain why a Cuomo spokesman was quick to attack the report as motivated by politics. As always, you see, our former governor is the victim, the poor fellow.

DiNapoli's audit findings reveal the Cuomo administration's decade-long groundwork of failed leadership and neglect that ensured New York's nursing homes were almost universally unprepared to prevent the spread of coronavirus infections within them. Deficiencies that quickly became apparent very early during the coronavirus pandemic and were known by top Cuomo administration officials when they imposed Cuomo's infamous deadly 25 March 2020 directive.

That's a key reason why Cuomo gifted legal immunity for COVID deaths to the state's hospital and nursing home lobby a week later, which is the act we believe marks the true beginning of the administration's cover-up of the excess COVID deaths that resulted among New York's nursing home residents during the period it was in effect. While many point to Cuomo's pandemic "leadership" book deal as a factor in driving the cover-up, we think it really provided Cuomo with a strong incentive to both impose his "leadership" over the state Department of Health's response and to continue the cover-up of nursing home deaths for as long as possible.

The cover-up lasted until his administration was forced to acknowledge them on 11 February 2021.

DiNapoli's audit also confirms something else we've been driving home here at the timeline. Cuomo's deadly directive required the complicit cooperation of hundreds of state government employees, particularly at the state's Department of Health. New York has a very long way to go in fully cleaning house following Andrew M. Cuomo's decade of neglect and abuse of power in service of his political interests.