Assume that everything New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo says is a lie, and you’ll be right more often than not.
He lied about his disastrous nursing home policy that forced long-term care facilities to accept coronavirus patients. He claimed it didn’t result in a disproportionate number of deaths. His administration then downplayed the true COVID-19 death toll in nursing homes to confirm Cuomo’s lie and avoid federal scrutiny.
Now it is being reported that Cuomo’s team was covering up nursing home deaths much earlier than had been previously known but for a different reason.
The New York Times reports:
- “Mr. Cuomo and his aides actually began concealing the numbers months earlier, as his aides were battling their own top health officials, and well before requests for data arrived from federal authorities, according to documents and interviews with six people with direct knowledge of the discussions, who requested anonymity to describe the closed-door debates.”
- “The July report allowed Mr. Cuomo to treat the nursing home issue as resolved last year, paving the way for him to focus on touting New York’s success in controlling the virus.”
In other words, Cuomo’s advisers reportedly convinced state health officials to alter the July 2020 report on nursing home resident fatalities so that Cuomo could sell books. He wanted to take a victory lap and bolster his position, given to him by the media, as one of the leading governors in the fight against the pandemic, so he tried to hide the devastating consequences of his own policies.
For a while, it worked. The July 2020 report was supposed to be a way for New York health officials to gauge whether Cuomo’s nursing home policy had any bearing on the number of coronavirus deaths in long-term care facilities. Because Cuomo’s team prevented health officials from releasing the complete data, health officials could argue that Cuomo’s policy did not have a direct effect on nursing home deaths, and Cuomo dismissed criticism of the policy as “political” nonsense.
But the published July 2020 report was a lie. The original report put the true death toll roughly 50% higher than the figure that was published, according to the New York Times.
By underreporting the total number of deaths in New York’s nursing homes, Cuomo held up the state’s numbers as a model for the rest of the nation and claimed success — or at least, less dramatic failure. In reality, New York’s numbers were far worse than any other state. Cuomo was to blame.
Now he’s finally facing the reckoning he’s due. State lawmakers must continue pushing for his resignation, and if he refuses, they should impeach him. Because at this point, it is clear Cuomo is incapable of thinking past himself, even if lives are on the line.
