28 March 2022: Opinion - Cuomo Lucky He Escaped Punishment for COVID Nursing Home Deaths

Cuomo for governor? He’s lucky he escaped punishment for COVID nursing home deaths (opinion)

Staten Island's Tom Wrobleski takes on Andrew M. Cuomo's hints he wants to return to New York's Executive Mansion after he resigned in disgrace rather than face being impeached by the state legislature. Here's the central portion of his critique of Cuomo's leadership failures as New York's governor:

Cuomo created a toxic work environment. He faced legal peril because of the accusations. He’d lost the moral authority to lead. He couldn’t continue as governor.

But as bad as the harassment allegations were, the Cuomo-created controversy surrounding COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes gave New Yorkers a true picture of what the former governor is made of. And none of it was good.

A Cuomo policy in March of 2020 forced nursing homes to accept potentially COVID-positive patients from hospitals. The nursing homes weren’t even allowed to test the incoming patients for the virus.

Imagine that. People these days run to a COVID testing site every time they have a sniffle, cough or a sore throat. But nursing homes weren’t allowed to test people for the virus at the very height of the deadly pandemic.

It was later revealed that Cuomo and his staffers hid the truth about the number of virus deaths in nursing homes out of fear that their horrific, misguided policy would be blamed.

The people died, Cuomo said. Who cares where they died?

This is an American tragedy that has never been fully addressed. How many family members suffered the loss of a loved one because of Cuomo’s policy?

The best estimate we've seen puts the number of excess COVID deaths among New York's nursing home residents in the hundreds, if not thousands. Those are deaths that would not have occurred if not for the effect of Andrew M. Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive. The number of family members who suffered a loss of a loved one because of Cuomo's policy is therefore well into the thousands.