New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, even as he was writing a book and being lavishly praised by Hollywood and the national media, was cooking the books to obscure the number of people dying in New York nursing homes, according to his state’s attorney general.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat, released a report on Thursday accusing Cuomo of undercounting coronavirus-related deaths in nursing homes by as much as 50%. The 76-page report found consistent discrepancies in reported deaths from nursing homes, including the state’s Health Department not counting the deaths of nursing home residents who died after being transferred from nursing homes.
Of course, this is just a formalization of what we already knew. In August, the Associated Press noted that “New York’s true nursing home death toll” was “cloaked in secrecy.” Cuomo admitted as much that very month, saying, “If you die in the nursing home, it’s a nursing home death. If you die in the hospital, it’s called a hospital death.”
We even knew this in May, when New York’s Health Department admitted that people who contracted the virus in a nursing home but died in a hospital were not being categorized as nursing home deaths. This was to protect Cuomo from criticism over his order forcing nursing homes to accept coronavirus-infected patients, which was removed from the Health Department’s website in May.
The establishment sought to demonize Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as the grim reaper — even promoting the absurd claim of so-called “scientist” Rebekah Jones that Florida was manipulating its coronavirus data. Even if it had been true, her allegation was given a ridiculous amount of exposure, considering that the discrepancy in numbers that she alleged was minuscule. Meanwhile, Cuomo was actually cooking the books. He was awarded an Emmy. He was the recipient of glowing media coverage for months.
Who can forget CNN’s Chris Cuomo holding a comically large test swab in an interview with his awful governor brother, just five days after the report came out about the state obscuring nursing home deaths?
The glowing media coverage is what enabled the governor to be so brazen and so reckless about human life. Consider how just this week he said without any hint of self-awareness that “incompetent government kills people. More people died than needed to die in COVID. That’s the truth.” He was talking about former President Donald Trump, of course, not himself, yet somehow he received no pushback from MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace. He repeated the sentiment on CNN, with Wolf Blitzer offering no pushback.
For months, Cuomo did all the things DeSantis was publicly accused of, many of which DeSantis didn’t actually do. The New York governor, in contrast to DeSantis, has overseen one of the highest death rates of any state, thanks in part to his nursing home order. What’s more, he successfully manipulated the numbers to avoid criticism. And he did it all while shamelessly promoting himself as a hero because none of the Democratic partisans in the media dared to call him out.
