8 September 2022: Cuomo’s COVID-19 Policy Incompetent

Opinion - Cuomo’s New York COVID-19 Policy Incompetent

This opinion piece by W.R. Daniel Bull appeared in Oswego State University's Oswegonian student newspaper on 8 September 2022. Here's an excerpt:

When the number of reported COVID-19 cases started to rise, Cuomo put the state of New York under lockdown. Schools were closed and students were forced to learn over Zoom; businesses were closed and some had to deliver their products. The number of rising cases seemed to have slowed down over the following months, and Cuomo would be declared a national hero by the political left. His leadership during the pandemic was often compared to that of former president Donald Trump in a negative light. He televised press conferences, in which he often talked about his family and other aspects of his personal life, seemingly to comfort New Yorkers. He would end up winning an Emmy for these.

But was his leadership really worthy of praise? In the year since he left office, I don’t think he was really at all competent. One thing that bugged me was how he handled schools. My last in person day of high school was March 13, 2020. Cuomo was hesitant to close school for the rest of the year. I will be embarrassed to admit, but I naively thought that I would be able to go back to school before June 2020. Given the obvious evidence to the contrary, I know that makes me look stupid, but what I do not understand is why Cuomo waited so long to keep schools closed when other governors decided to close them for the rest of the year early on.

Aside from his sheer incompetence over handling schools, what really soured my opinion over Cuomo was his policy on nursing homes. Hospitals were quickly being overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, to the point in which a navy hospital ship was dispatched to New York harbor. In an effort to alleviate the stress on the hospitals, nursing homes were ordered to take in COVID-19 patients. By March 2020, it was established that COVID-19 was both an airborne illness and among the most vulnerable to serious illness or death from COVID-19 were the elderly. This order was revoked in May, but the damage was done. The following January, it was later revealed that the Cuomo administration deliberately undercounted and withheld the true number of nursing home deaths, fearful that they would be investigated by the Department of Justice under former president Donald Trump.

The timeline indicates the fear of being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice was a complete afterthought. In truth, as best as we can tell from the available evidence, the motive for Andrew M. Cuomo to cover up COVID nursing home deaths dates to 19 March 2020, when Cuomo's literary agent first took calls from book publishers about a potential book deal related to his management of the growing pandemic emergency. Less than a week later, Cuomo's panic at how quickly SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infections were spreading prompted him to implement his infamous deadly 25 March 2020 directive. To score the biggest book deal possible, Cuomo needed to have his pandemic policies appear to be as successful as possible, which he already knew would be undermined by excess deaths resulting from his deadly directive. The first step in the cover-up then came with Cuomo's 2 April 2020 gift of legal immunity for COVID deaths to nursing home operators.

Without that deal, the risk of liability exposure for nursing home operators would give them every reason to both resist going along with the deadly directive and to directly point to deaths caused by exposure of nursing home residents to COVID-infected patients being dumped out of New York hospitals because of the directive. With the deal, they would keep silent. The deal thus initiated the cover-up, which Cuomo then used to bank the biggest possible book deal he could while promoting his national political prospects.

What could have been had Cuomo's personal ethics were not so corrupt? We'll never know, but for his part, Bull describes what could have been had only Cuomo come clean:

I would have slightly forgiven Cuomo if he had said that he made a serious error in judgment and apologized to the public, but instead he was more worried about the backlash to the revelations and claimed that the whole episode was politically motivated. He was not sorry, and he was never held accountable. This was a man that the media wanted us to praise, but he was incompetent at best! He looked good in front of a camera, but he did not know what he was doing in regards to schools and his callous disregard for New York’s elderly was despicable.

At a minimum, Cuomo's despicable acts could reasonably be described as criminally negligent manslaughter under New York state law. But then, so would many others holding power within New York's state government for their roles in helping implement and enforce the deadly directive. We think Cuomo has only so far escaped accountability in this matter because if he does, many of them will go down with him.