New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo may soon join New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in the running for “worst elected official in the United States.”
The governor’s office, whose handling of the coronavirus pandemic has been disastrously incompetent from Day One, released a study this week blaming healthcare workers (and not Cuomo’s directive that saw more than 6,300 recovering COVID-19 patients dumped into long-term care facilities) for New York’s nursing home death toll, which is the worst of any state in the union.
Yes, the Cuomo administration would rather blame the state’s astronomical nursing home death toll on healthcare workers (the people who showed up every day to care for the sick and the dying) than accept some responsibility for an order that specifically prohibited those facilities from rejecting infectious coronavirus patients.
America’s “most popular politician” indeed.
The governor’s office contends that “the virus’ rampant spread through the state’s nursing homes was propelled by more than 20,000 infected home staffers, many of whom kept going to work unaware they had the virus in March and April,” the Associated Press reports. “Another 17,500 workers were infected through early June.”
“Facts matter. And those are the facts,” New York State Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker told reporters this week.
As of this writing, more than 6,400 deaths have been “linked to the coronavirus in New York’s nursing home and long-term care facilities,” the Associated Press notes.
Blast those healthcare workers!
And here is another amusing snippet from the Associated Press report: “The Cuomo administration didn’t release how exactly they reached the report’s conclusions, which back up Cuomo’s repeated defenses. And the report has its limits: It only looks at the number of residents who died inside nursing homes and not at hospitals, for example.”
I, for one, am shocked (shocked!) that a Cuomo administration-produced study absolving the Cuomo administration of any wrongdoing would lack transparency and rely on apparently dubious figures. If you cannot trust a governor who thought it was a good idea to offload coronavirus patients into nursing homes, then who can you trust?
While we are on the topic of Cuomo’s mishandling of the COVID-19 epidemic, it is worth mentioning now that a Wall Street Journal investigation uncovered a laundry list of missteps by the governor and his team, all of which most likely added to the situation of New York having the worst coronavirus death rate of any state. The missteps include, but are not limited to:
• Insufficient isolation protocols. Hospitals often mixed infected patients with the uninfected early on, and the virus spread to non-Covid-19 units.
• Inadequate staff planning. Hospitals added hundreds of intensive-care beds but not always enough trained staff, leading to improper treatments and overlooked patients dying alone.
• Mixed messages. State, city government and hospital officials kept shifting guidelines about when exposed and ill front-line workers should return to work.
• Overreliance on government sources for key equipment. Hospitals turned to the state and federal government for hundreds of ventilators, but many were faulty or inadequate.
• Procurement-planning gaps. While leaders focused attention on procuring ventilators, hospitals didn’t always provide for adequate supplies of critical resources including oxygen, vital-signs monitors and dialysis machines.
• Incomplete staff-protection policies. Many hospitals provided staff with insufficient protective equipment and testing.
Separate investigations conducted by ProPublica similarly uncovered a pattern of reckless ineptitude on the part of Cuomo’s office, all of which likely explains why the Empire State has 10 times the number of COVID-19 deaths as California.
Yet, here is the governor’s team this week, claiming both that there is “no reason to place blame” on anyone and that infected healthcare workers are responsible for the state’s staggering nursing home death toll.
Cuomo screwed up badly; there are really no two ways about it. The governor’s little brother, CNN host Chris Cuomo, and the like-minded sycophants in the press can claim all they want that the elder Cuomo is an ultra-competent statesman and hero, but the facts do not support this.
Perhaps the governor himself understands this. Perhaps that is why, with things such as this laughable study absolving his administration of his disastrous decision to offload infectious coronavirus patients into nursing homes, Andrew Cuomo is trying to rewrite the history of his pandemic response.
Do not let him get away with it.
