Multiple news outlets are reporting that the FBI has opened an investigation of COVID-19 nursing home deaths in New York under the leadership of Gov. Andrew Cuomo. A timeline of events lays out a stark contrast between the advice he offered to his own family and his TV journalist brother and the orders he imposed on New York nursing homes.
“Two weeks ago that I even mentioned my mother was at his house. And I said, that is a mistake,” said Cuomo, adding, “Yeah, I feel bad she’s cooped up in the apartment too. But you bring her to your house, you expose her to a lot of things: You have the kids there, you have your wife there, you’re coming and going. Your wife is coming and going. And you can expose Mom to the virus.”
Six days before that March 31 press conference, on March 25, even as the virus was known to be a grave threat in nursing homes, the governor issued a statewide directive that said, “No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.”
That directive was issued out of concern that New York hospitals were filling to capacity and there would be nowhere else to place coronavirus-positive nursing home patients just released from hospitals.
In fact, the week before that directive, on March 18, 2020, the Trump administration announced that the hospital ship USNS Comfort would be deployed to New York. On March 23, 2020, Cuomo announced that the massive Javits Convention Center would be transformed into a field hospital, and in early April, Trump approved Cuomo’s request to treat coronavirus patients there.
But by April 9, the New York Post reported both facilities were mostly empty. Defense officials blamed the bottleneck “partly on state health officials initially saddling the feds with a 15-page list of instructions detailing which patients can be admitted,” said Major Gen. William Hall, the commander of Joint Task Force Civil Support.
And on May 17, 2020, Cuomo was tested for the coronavirus himself to encourage more New Yorkers to be tested.
As the Cuomo brothers joked about nasal swabs, in mid-May, the federal government began requiring nursing homes to provide data on COVID-19 deaths.
Cuomo defended his state’s record, claiming that New York ranked 35th among states in per capita nursing home deaths.
Unpersuaded, the state legislature commenced hearings, but Cuomo’s state health director, Howard Zucker, refused to provide a total number of coronavirus deaths, claiming that number was still being “audited.”
On Aug. 12, the Associated Press reported that New York nursing home deaths may have been more than 11,000, almost double what the state was then claiming.
On Aug. 20, Cuomo deflected accusations of an undercount, saying, “If you die in the nursing home, it’s a nursing home death. If you die in the hospital, it’s called a hospital death.”
But pressure mounted. Citing the AP tally of August of more than 11,000 deaths, in early September, President Donald Trump accused Cuomo of grossly undercounting nursing home deaths.
A month later, the Department of Justice undertook an initial investigation, noting that New York was the only one of the states not to include hospitalized nursing home patients among death totals.
On Jan. 28, 2021, Cuomo’s defense collapsed when State Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, released data that found the state was undercounting nursing home coronavirus deaths by 50%.
Two weeks later, on Feb. 11, the New York Post reported that in a phone call, the governor’s secretary, Melissa DeRosa, apologized for misleading state Democratic lawmakers. She said Cuomo’s administration “froze” out of fear that the real information would be “used against us.”
Democratic Assemblyman Ron Kim is now claiming that the governor threatened him for speaking out against the handling of nursing home deaths.
“He spent 10 minutes, 10 minutes berating me, yelling at me, threatening me and my career, my livelihood,” said Kim.
A senior aide to the governor told the NBC affiliate in NY that Kim is lying and denies any threats were made.
Last June, when he was questioned about his nursing home directive and nursing home deaths, Cuomo blamed Republicans and the Trump administration, saying, “We had more people die because the federal government missed the boat and never told us that this virus was coming from Europe and not from China.”
Now, many in his own party are blaming him. And the Cuomo administration, which long claimed to rely on facts and science, is finally acknowledging that more than 15,049 New Yorkers died from the coronavirus in nursing homes as of Feb. 9.
