New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is facing a series of sexual harassment allegations, but let’s not take our eye off the other scandal. He covered up thousands of COVID deaths to make himself look better. Yes, his top aides said they feared a federal investigation under the Trump administration, but that’s weak sauce. That’s not an excuse. We all see why Cuomo undercounted the number of COVID deaths in nursing homes. He signed an executive order that forced these facilities to admit COVID-positive patients. He was on television looking like a COVID response ace. In reality, he was an incompetent moron who was killing New York’s elderly by the fistful. He won an Emmy for his pressers. He wrote a book about how awesome he was; the media establishment adored him. He was a beacon of leadership amid this pandemic, boasting that incompetence is what caused unnecessary COVID deaths. He should look in the mirror.
The sick part about this is that his staff apologized, not for the immeasurable amount of pain they inflicted on thousands of families, but for the political inconvenience it may have caused state Democrats. Assemblyman Ron Kim was threatened by Cuomo’s office for criticizing the governor, which exposed another side of this administration: their fetish for bullying and intimidating members of the press. New York is being run by a mob boss who has people who get off on being bullies. We have folks in this office who felt like their boss’ media profile made them untouchable. Not the case. Suppression of materials that federal authorities asked for could be a criminal offense. And now The Wall Street Journal adds another piece of digital evidence, which is that Cuomo’s aides altered the death toll reports (via 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.
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And this comes off of the New York attorney general’s office report noting a 50 percent undercount as well as zeroing in on Cuomo’s nursing home order, which may have spread the disease and caused more death. These facilities house the most vulnerable, the folks most susceptible to dying from the virus if infected — and Cuomo packed these COVID patients into these places like sardines. Of course, hordes of people died. The irony of this office doing what it did to avoid a federal investigation is that it now might bring one. State panels should be convened as well. And yes, Cuomo should be impeached. His goons did what they usually do to members of the media: browbeat them into submission. This is a cabal of thugs. That’s New York Democrats. That’s Democrats in general. They’re a corrupt species. This Cuomo administration is simply incompetent, inhuman, and devoid of any empathy or compassion. Psychopaths are running New York.
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