Gov. Kathy Hochul has added nearly 12,000 COVID-19 deaths to New York’s total following her pledge for “total transparency” after former Gov. Andrew Cuomo was accused of hiding the state’s true death count for political purposes.
Hochul, who has attempted to distance herself from Cuomo despite serving as his lieutenant governor for two of his three terms, submitted additional death certificate data to the New York Department of Health indicating that 55,395 statewide deaths were attributed to COVID-19, a sharp uptick from the roughly 43,400 deaths reported as of Cuomo’s final day in office on Monday.
“We’re now releasing more data than had been released before publicly, so people know the nursing home deaths and the hospital deaths are consistent with what’s being displayed by the CDC,” Hochul told MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Wednesday. “There’s a lot of things that weren’t happening, and I’m going to make them happen. Transparency will be the hallmark of my administration.”
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which also monitors COVID-19 deaths across the country and receives data from state health departments, said the new cases likely stemmed from case reporting, according to the Mortality Statistics Branch within the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.
“Apparently, NY was only counting deaths occurring in health care facilities. They were not counting deaths occurring at home,” Jeff Lancashire, public affairs officer for the NCHS, wrote in an email to the Washington Examiner.
“But this has not been an issue with the death certificate reporting, i.e., we have not received 12,000 additional death certificates from NY,” Lancashire continued, noting that the “CDC has two sources of COVID death data: NCHS publishes data from the death certificates, while the data you cite come from the case surveillance system.”
Cuomo attracted criticism for his reporting of COVID-19 deaths, particularly within the state’s nursing homes, after Melissa DeRosa, one of his top aides, admitted in February that the Cuomo administration hid the true nursing home death toll out of fear of political retribution from then-President Donald Trump.
“Basically, we froze,” DeRosa told Democratic leaders during a video conference. “Because then, we were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us while we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation. That played a very large role into this.”
The Trump administration opened a Department of Justice investigation into the matter, as well as similar allegations surrounding nursing home deaths in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, but the investigation was then closed under President Joe Biden in July.
Cuomo, who denied all accusations of wrongdoing, signed an executive order on March 25 of last year shielding nursing homes from liability when admitting COVID-19-positive patients, a policy government watchdog group Empire Center for Public Policy found was linked to over 1,000 additional resident deaths. He then rescinded the nursing home policy on May 10 of this year.
The former governor grappled with multiple scandals, including claims that he sexually harassed at least 11 women. Though he denied all allegations of inappropriate touching, Cuomo announced his resignation on Aug. 10 following the Aug. 3 release of a report by New York Attorney General Letitia James in support of the accusers’ claims.
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In the days leading up to her ascension to the governorship on Tuesday, Hochul pledged to purge the governor’s mansion of “unethical” Cuomo staff members and end the “toxic workplace environment.”
“Nobody named in that report doing anything unethical will remain in my administration,” Hochul said on Aug. 11.
