26 March 2022: Opinion - Cuomo's Obligation to COVID Victims' Families

Andrew Cuomo’s obligation to COVID victims’ families

This op-ed is by Peter Arbeeny, one of the surviving family members whose father died after being infected with COVID-19 at the nursing home where he lived during the period Andrew M. Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive was in effect.

Written in the form of a letter to Cuomo, he retells the story of the death of his father and puts in the context of the policies Andrew M. Cuomo and his administration enacted. Here's an extended excerpt:

I’ve seen you sticking your feet back in the waters of public life with some high-profile speeches and ads. It reminded me of something. Today marks the two-year anniversary of your March 25, 2020, directive forcing nursing homes to admit COVID-19-positive patients at a time when, lacking the proper resources‚ such as basic staffing, PPE and infection control processes, the homes were not adequately equipped to do so.

Can we talk about that, please? I know you’d rather attack Attorney General Tish James for what you view as a political hit job. But the nursing home mandate is painful and personal to me, because I believe it led directly to the death of my father, Norman Arbeeny. My father was in Cobble Hill Nursing Home in Brooklyn for reasons unrelated to COVID, and less than 24 hours after we took him home, he became sick. He passed away before his COVID-19 test came back positive. Because he died at home, his death was never included in the nursing home death toll, even though that was clearly where he contracted the virus.

Instead of admitting the March 25 directive — which the Health Department reversed — was a mistake, so that we could all learn and grow, you and your administration proceeded to falsify nursing home death numbers. State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s newly released audit shows the multiple ways your Health Department intentionally hid the true number of deaths from the public and failed to account for approximately 4,100 lives lost due to COVID-19 in nursing homes. DiNapoli said, “Our audit findings are extremely troubling. 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.”

It is clear from the comptroller’s report that playing with the numbers made New York’s performance look better than other states’ — while helping boost your reputation as a bold pandemic warrior and ultimately sell copies of “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Not that so many were sold.

Yet when my family was denied answers by your administration, we spoke up loudly and demonstrated. Your spokesman accused us of being right-wing agitators. Do you really stand by that?

Even though our feelings were hurt, we invited you to our father’s family home in Brooklyn multiple times, to discuss our beloved father and the way for families like us to receive empathy from our governor. We only wanted closure — and to make sure something like this could never happen again.

It didn’t happen. Instead of visiting my family in Brooklyn this anniversary month, you visited a church in Brooklyn to complain about being a victim of “cancel culture.” You apologized for being unaware that your behavior towards the women who accused you of sexual misconduct was “politically incorrect.” But you still haven’t frankly apologized for the nursing home debacle. Maybe then, as you say God isn’t finished with you yet, the surviving families are not finished with you yet.

There's more, but we think what makes Arbeeny's op-ed stand out is that it could only be written as it was because Andrew M. Cuomo has neither accepted responsibility nor has been held accountable for the deadly consequences of the 25 March 2020 directive he implemented during the coronavirus pandemic.