Now that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo does not have former President Donald Trump to kick around anymore, it’s getting harder for him to hide the utter incompetence of his leadership during COVID-19. It turns out that the biggest stain on his record, the unnecessary deaths of thousands of nursing home residents, is even worse than initially thought.
One of the most inexplicable phenomena during the pandemic has been the efforts of the media to prop up Cuomo as some sort of Churchillian figure. In their need to create a hero character to contrast with Trump, they rallied around Cuomo and praised his daily press briefings even as his state bungled its response to COVID-19 as badly as, or perhaps worse than, any other.
The governor had the temerity to write a book on what he described as his success in fighting the virus. And he was laughably given an Emmy for crisis communication. “The governor’s 111 daily briefings worked so well because he effectively created television shows, with characters, plot lines, and stories of success and failure,” International Academy President and CEO Bruce L. Paisner said at the time in announcing the award.
Back on planet Earth, Cuomo’s leadership cost lives. He waited months before cleaning up the subways; he fumbled the reopening of schools; he incredibly forced providers to throw away COVID-19 vaccines to avoid the fines he imposed against anybody who vaccinated people outside the rigid sequence he had commanded.
But by far, the deadliest decision Cuomo made was to force nursing homes to readmit residents who had tested positive for COVID-19 and then been hospitalized. This allowed the virus to spread like wildfire among an extremely vulnerable population.
That much was known already. But this week, the state’s attorney general’s office issued a report finding that prior estimates had undercounted the deaths at nursing homes by a staggering 50%.
As an example, the report says, “A facility reported five confirmed and six presumed COVID-19 deaths at the facility as of August 3 to [the Department of Health]. However, the facility reported to [the Office of the Attorney General] a total of 27 COVID-19 deaths at the facility and 13 hospital deaths — a discrepancy of 29 deaths.”
It specifically noted Cuomo’s order as one of the culprits: “Government guidance requiring the admission of COVID-19 patients into nursing homes may have put residents at increased risk of harm in some facilities and may have obscured the data available to assess that risk.”
As the Associated Press summarized, “The surprise development, after months of the state refusing to divulge its true numbers, showed that at least 12,743 long-term care residents died of the virus as of Jan. 19, far greater than the official tally of 8,505 on that day, cementing New York’s toll as one of the highest in the nation.”
“What I’ve found all through this crisis is that people value the truth,” Cuomo said with a straight face during a recent MSNBC interview. “Give me the information. Don’t give me the spin. Give me facts that don’t change. Tell me the truth.” Going on to blame the federal government for his state’s slow vaccine rollout, Cuomo said, “Incompetent government kills people.”
It may have been the least self-aware statement from a public official since Oedipus wondered who had brought a curse upon Thebes.
