15 May 2022: Editorial Reveals Andrew M. Cuomo's Legacy

Editorial: The deadly shame of the LaSalle Veterans’ Home

The editors of the Chicago Tribune didn't set out to describe Andrew M. Cuomo's sad legacy in this 9 May 2022 editorial. But they revealed it all the same as they lamented a preventable tragedy at a southern Illinois nursing home in November 2020. The following excerpt illustrates how:

The home knew that at least two members of staff and two residents had tested positive by Sunday, Nov. 1. The IDVA knew about it but did not have adequate protocols in place. The IDPH knew about it. So, according to the audit, did the state’s first assistant deputy governor for health and human services. But knowing about it and doing something about it clearly was not the same thing.

The home didn’t test the rest of the staff until Nov. 3, 4, and 5, an unconscionable delay. And that was just the process of collection. The tests then had to go to the lab and the results didn’t come back to the home until Nov. 6 and 7, close to a full week after the home knew it had a crisis.

As context, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first antigen test for emergency use on May 9. Abbott Diagnostics Scarborough, Inc’s BinaxNOW COVID-19 Ag Card was authorized for use at the point-of-care under an emergency use authorization that was issued in August 2020. There also is a mention in the report of staff attending a Halloween party, although as with most COVID-19 issues, there is no certainty as to its role in the infection of those residents.

It is, of course, important to see what transpired at the LaSalle Veterans’ Home in the context of the overall situation that fall in downstate Illinois, when cases were increasing rapidly in that part of the state. This was before the vaccine had become widely available, of course. And all of the agencies mentioned in the audit were strapped, stressed and struggling to see the full picture of what was happening around them. It is one thing to look back now with a critical eye and another to live through those circumstances.

Illinois was hardly alone in failing to take care of the vulnerable residents of its nursing homes. Although initially heralded as a pandemic hero on CNN, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo later was accused both of forcing nursing homes to accept COVID-19-positive patients coming out of New York’s hospitals and then obfuscating the data surrounding the deaths of nursing home residents in the state.

That last paragraph says it all. The outcome of Andrew M. Cuomo's deadly 25 March 2020 directive and his subsequent cover-up of the full extent of COVID nursing home deaths that resulted from it has become a cautionary tale. One used as a point of comparison with similar tragedies to say "this was bad, but it could have been much, much worse".

This editorial shorthand demonstrates what Cuomo's legacy is becoming. For editors, his name is now on par with that of the bogeyman as the representative example for describing the kind of failed government leadership that gets innocent people killed through deliberate negligence.