New York failed to account for 4,100 coronavirus deaths among nursing home residents, a scandal that rocked state leadership and led to several investigations, according to an audit released Tuesday.
The state’s Department of Health, which was “slow to respond to a federal directive to conduct surveys of nursing homes for infection control problems,” surveyed only 20% of its nursing homes from March 23 to May 30, 2020, and officials understated nursing home deaths attributed to COVID-19 by at least 4,100 and, at times, by more than 50%, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced Tuesday.
“The pandemic was devastating and deadly for New Yorkers in nursing homes. Our audit findings are troubling and demonstrate missed opportunities to protect nursing home residents,” DiNapoli tweeted.
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The department also stonewalled auditors by imposing “impediments on the audit, including delaying requested data, limiting auditors’ contact with program staff, not addressing auditors’ questions during meetings, and not providing supporting documentation,” the audit, which covered the period from January 2017 to November 2021, alleged.
“These are not routine actions by state agencies undergoing an Office of the State Comptroller audit and raise serious concerns about the control environment at DOH,” the report said.
DiNapoli’s findings were unsurprising given Cuomo’s “pure egotism” and “self-enrichment,” Assemblyman Ron Kim said.
“Cuomo suppressed and covered up life-and-death data while pursuing a multi-million dollar book deal. … His actions were never about protecting our most vulnerable, they were about pure egotism and self-enrichment at the cost of others’ lives,” he continued. “I want to thank State Comptroller DiNapoli for putting politics aside to complete this report, which acknowledges the pain and suffering of far too many heartbroken families.”
Attorney General Letitia James, another frequent Cuomo foil who unexpectedly balked last December when directed by a state ethics board to collect the earnings from the former governor’s memoirs, said she was “grateful” to the comptroller for “bringing much-needed transparency to this critical issue.”
“This audit affirms many of the findings that we uncovered last year about the state’s response to COVID, most notably that DOH and the former governor undercounted the number of deaths in nursing homes by as much as 50%,” she said in a statement.
But as recently as Monday, Cuomo, who has indicated an intent to reemerge in the political arena, was promoting a new ad celebrating his response to the pandemic.
“Talk is cheap. What matters in life is real results. … In the early, dark days of March 2020, [Cuomo] guided this state and this nation through the COVID crisis,” Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi said in a Monday statement. “While some have attempted to rewrite history, New Yorkers know that Gov. Cuomo fought for and delivered real results for them — and he always will.”
In a voiceover for the ad, titled “The Record,” the former governor said he “led this nation through the frightening COVID crisis.”
“I’ve never stopped fighting for New Yorkers, and I never will,” he concluded.
Under then-President Donald Trump, the federal government opened an investigation into Cuomo’s policy of admitting COVID-19-positive patients into nursing homes after top Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa acknowledged that the state hid the true death toll amid fears of political retribution, but the Biden Justice Department dropped that inquiry last July.
Cuomo had signed an executive order March 25, 2020, shielding nursing homes from liability when admitting COVID-19-positive patients, a policy that government watchdog group Empire Center for Public Policy found was linked to more than 1,000 additional resident deaths. He rescinded the policy May 10, 2021.
The then governor earned the backing of the Joint Commission on Public Ethics to write American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from COVID-19 Pandemic, but the arrangement sparked ethics concerns from liberal watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics that government resources may have been used to promote the memoir. While Cuomo acknowledged that there may have been an “incidental” use of state resources, he maintained that staffers volunteered to help with the book.
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Cuomo, who denied all allegations of wrongdoing, resigned Aug. 24, 2021, after James released a bombshell report earlier that month saying he sexually harassed 11 women, findings seemingly corroborated by a separate investigation from the New York State Assembly months later.
While Cuomo is eligible to pursue the governorship again, incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul, who served as his lieutenant governor, has consolidated support around her bid for a full term, earning the backing of the New York Democratic Party’s state convention Feb. 17. Still, evidence suggests Cuomo would present a formidable challenge to his onetime running mate, with a recent poll indicating that the two are in a statistical dead heat.
