New York has had more nursing home deaths than any other state. Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants people to think that his policy forcing long-term care facilities to accept infectious COVID-19 patients had nothing to do with it.
The Democratic governor has continued to defend his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, specifically his controversial and confusing directive ordering nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients after they were released from nearby hospitals. The policy’s effects were immediate and devastating, according to an in-depth report by ProPublica. COVID-19 spread like “fire through dry grass” throughout New York’s nursing homes, and nearly 6,000 elderly, vulnerable residents died as a result.
You won’t hear about any of this from Cuomo.
“Yes, we had more people die in nursing homes than anywhere else because we had more people die, because the federal government missed the boat and never told us this virus was coming from Europe and not from China,” he told MSNBC on Monday. “So, New York had more cases, more deaths, and more deaths in nursing home because that’s who the virus affects. It affects senior citizens, we know that.”
To blame his policy for disseminating the virus and causing these deaths, Cuomo added, is just a “political charade” and an “ugly one,” at that.
But to question the connection, as New York Republicans have been doing for months, is to put the finger where it hurts, and that’s the reason Cuomo refuses to answer. Instead, he’s blamed the Trump administration, the hospitals, and, get this, the nursing homes themselves. It’s everyone’s fault but his own.
Cuomo would do better owning this one. He needs to take responsibility for his own policy decisions. He thinks it’s unfair to lay the blame at his feet because back in late February and early March, we knew very little about the coronavirus in general.
And he’s at least right in that it’s easy to criticize in hindsight. But the one thing we knew from the get-go was that COVID-19 disproportionately affected elderly, high-risk individuals. Despite this, Cuomo decided to send coronavirus patients directly into his state’s most vulnerable population. He knew the risks, and he did it anyway.
