It’s been revealed this morning that disgraced New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office didn’t just undercount COVID nursing home deaths, but actually rewrote a health report in the summer of last year to hide them, stripping out many of the COVID deaths so that the number would be much lower:
WSJ – New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top advisers successfully pushed state health officials to strip a public report of data showing that more nursing-home residents had died of Covid-19 than the administration had acknowledged, according to people with knowledge of the report’s production.
The July report, which examined the factors that led to the spread of the virus in nursing homes, focused only on residents who died inside long-term-care facilities, leaving out those who had died in hospitals after becoming sick in nursing homes. As a result, the report said 6,432 nursing-home residents had died—a significant undercount of the death toll attributed to the state’s most vulnerable population, the people said. The initial version of the report said nearly 10,000 nursing-home residents had died in New York by July last year, one of the people said.
The changes Mr. Cuomo’s aides and health officials made to the nursing-home report, which haven’t been previously disclosed, reveal that the state possessed a fuller accounting of out-of-facility nursing-home deaths as early as the summer. The Health Department resisted calls by state and federal lawmakers, media outlets and others to release the data for another eight months.
State officials now say more than 15,000 residents of nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities were confirmed or presumed to have died from Covid-19 since March of last year—counting both those who died in long-term-care facilities and those who died later in hospitals. That figure is about 50% higher than earlier official death tolls.
The entire reason Cuomo’s office was hiding these numbers is because of his deadly order that forced nursing homes to take back COVID patients:
The March 25 order came as hospitals were rushing to make space for an expected surge of coronavirus patients.
Nursing-home operators, learning of the policy only after it was issued, immediately objected, saying it would introduce the virus into their facilities. A national group representing nursing-home health providers said at the time that the March 25 directive was “not in the least consistent with patient safety principles.”
These nursing home operators were exactly right as everyone can plainly see. An Cuomo knew it, which is why they began this campaign to undercount and hide so many of these nursing home deaths. Even after all of this began to be exposed, Cuomo has continued to lie about, blaming the insurge of COVID on nursing home staffers.
It isn’t just the Wall Street Journal writing about this. The New York Times had their own article about this come out this morning, exposing the same corrupt behavior:
NY TIMES – Top aides to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo were alarmed: A report written by state health officials had just landed, and it included a count of how many nursing home residents in New York had died in the pandemic.
The number — more than 9,000 by that point in June — was not public, and the governor’s most senior aides wanted to keep it that way. They rewrote the report to take it out, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The extraordinary intervention, which came just as Mr. Cuomo was starting to write a book on his pandemic achievements, was the earliest act yet known in what critics have called a monthslong effort by the governor and his aides to obscure the full scope of nursing home deaths.
After the state attorney general revealed earlier this year that thousands of deaths of nursing home residents had been undercounted, Mr. Cuomo finally released the complete data, saying he had withheld it out of concern that the Trump administration might pursue a politically motivated inquiry into the state’s handling of the outbreak in nursing homes.
But 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.
Cuomo might have been able to offer a phony apology for his sexual harassment claims, but the like isn’t going to work here. His office actually REWROTE an official health department document to hide these deaths from the public eye! He covered up the horrors of his deadly March 25 policy and should be resigning in disgrace as we speak as they cart him off to prison!
Lastly, I wanted to post this embarrassing video that has been circulating this morning if the media praising Cuomo last year. It’s really incredible and the ending is epic:
How embarrassing.pic.twitter.com/P4P7oKJiaJ
— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) March 5, 2021