Gov. Andrew Cuomo tells one of the biggest lies of the pandemic
He’s a damn liar.
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New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo alleged this week that long-term care facilities in the Empire State “never needed” to accept coronavirus-positive patients.
“It never happened,” he said during a press call, presumably with a straight face.
This is so exceptionally dishonest, one can hardly believe he actually said it.
"I put my head on the pillow at night saying I saved lives,” said the governor of the state with the worst overall COVID death toll and the second-worst per capita death rate in the union. “That's how I sleep at night. And I know we have.”
A reporter for Finger Lakes News Radio challenged Cuomo, asking him to reconcile his sense of accomplishment with reports showing that more than 11,000 people may have died as a result of the governor's order requiring that long-term care facilities accept the readmission of infectious coronavirus patients.
“What would you say to New York residents who lost their loved ones in nursing homes due to your mandate back in late March regarding sending COVID-positive patients back to nursing homes?” the reporter asked.
Cuomo deployed several tactics in his response, including gaslighting, blaming the federal government, and attacking Florida.
The following is a summation of the governor's eight-minute-plus answer. Read it all the way through. Trust me:
I would say, first of all, that’s not why they lost a loved one. Your premise, the premise of your question, is just factually wrong. People who were lost in nursing homes were lost because that’s where the virus preys. The virus preys on senior citizens. The virus was introduced in this country in Washington, state of Washington in a nursing home. That’s who succumb to this virus, are immune-compromised senior citizens, and they’re predominantly located in nursing homes.
[…]
If you’d like to actually understand some facts, I’ll have them send you a full report that was done, and then you’ll be able to help people with some facts.
Ignorance doesn’t help grieving people. The rule that the state had, which was from the CDC guidance, right? The state didn’t make it up; they were following the CDC guidance. Now you can say, ‘Well, the state health department was stupid to follow the federal guidance,’ and you may have a point there. But the rule said the nursing homes can’t discriminate on the basis of COVID. The law also said a nursing home cannot accept a person who they cannot treat effectively while protecting the other residents. That’s the law. The point of the two rules was, if hospitals became overwhelmed, which was a real possibility, if not probability early on, we’d have to discharge people from hospitals and they’d have to go back to nursing homes. And that’s why the anticipatory rule was you can’t discriminate against a COVID-positive person. But you’d have to be able to take care of them without infecting other people. And if you can’t do that, you can’t accept them.
That situation never came to be in New York state because we flattened the curve so effectively we always had available hospital beds.
If you can believe it, it gets worse.
“So,” Cuomo concluded, “we never scrambled for beds, and we never needed nursing home beds because we always had hospital beds. So, it just never happened in New York, where we needed to say to a nursing home, ‘We need you to take this person even though they’re COVID positive.’ It never happened.”
He added, “We had extra beds. We had extra beds at Javits; we had extra beds at emergency hospitals that we put up all across the state. So, it just never happened that we needed a nursing home to take a COVID-positive person. It never happened.”
This is so breathtakingly misleading. New York’s own State Department of Health reports that "6,326 COVID-positive residents were admitted to [nursing home] facilities" after Cuomo issued his disastrous mandate. It happened. If the governor is trying to weasel out of responsibility for his own dictate by leaning on the word “needed,” that may be worse than an outright lie.
The timeline is this: New York’s Health Department on March 25 released an advisory mandating that long-term care facilities accept "the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals.”
"No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the [nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19," the advisory clearly stated. "[Nursing homes] are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission."
Following a backlash, Cuomo issued a separate order on May 10 saying patients must first test negative for coronavirus prior to admission to a nursing home.
Later, on May 21, the Associated Press reported that more than “4,500 recovering coronavirus patients were sent to New York's already vulnerable nursing homes" because of Cuomo’s directive.
Then, in July, a study by New York’s Health Department found that "approximately 6,326 COVID-positive residents were admitted to facilities between March 25, 2020, and May 8, 2020."
In August, the AP reported separately that as many as 11,000 people may have died because of the nursing home advisory.
"New York’s coronavirus death toll in nursing homes … could actually be a significant undercount,” the AP reports. “Unlike every other state with major outbreaks, New York only counts residents who died on nursing home property and not those who were transported to hospitals and died there.”
It adds, "That statistic could add thousands to the state’s official care home death toll of just over 6,600. But so far the administration of Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has refused to divulge the number, leading to speculation the state is manipulating the figures to make it appear it is doing better than other states and to make a tragic situation less dire."
And here is the governor of New York, where more people have died of the coronavirus than anywhere else in the United States, attempting to gaslight to the public into thinking he did not do that thing he most absolutely did.
I don’t know what is going on in New York, but it has managed somehow to produce both the worst mayor and the worst governor in the union.