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Cuomo Lies: Actually, We Didn't Send Any COVID Patients Into Nursing Homes

Guy Benson
Guy Benson  |  October 02, 2020 10:25 AM

Just when you think this man cannot get more brazenly dishonest, he manages to prove you wrong. New York's Democratic governor -- who has presided over the highest number of COVID deaths in the nation, and one of the worst death rates -- is not only writing a book about his "success" and congratulating himself for saving lives. He's not only falsely claiming that President Trump is responsible for the virus arriving in New York. And he's no longer merely manipulating data to downplay his disastrously lethal policy on nursing homes. He's now taken his gaslighting to shockingly mendacious lows, telling New Yorkers that the nursing homes scandal...never existed. Simply stunning:


"It just never happened that we needed a nursing home to take a COVID-positive person," he says. No matter how you slice it, this is a lie. The lie he appears to be telling here is one of obfuscation, to dismiss a very serious matter by rebutting an accusation nobody is actually leveling. Is anyone claiming that the terrible policy he inflicted on New York involved forcing nursing homes to take in coronavirus-infected patients because of a lack of hospital beds elsewhere? That's obviously not the allegation. The allegation, which is absolutely true, is that New York State forced long-term care centers and nursing homes to permit COVID-positive residents to enter those facilities while infected, seriously endangering the vulnerable populations inside. For weeks on end, New York also permitted COVID-positive nursing home employees to show up for work, putting residents at more risk. The goal, pursued by other states, should have been to keep people with coronavirus as far away as these places as possible, but the Cuomo administration mandated the opposite. And thousands died as a result. Thousands more, in fact, that the Cuomo administration will publicly admit, which is the crux of the active cover-up. May I remind you of this Associated Press investigative report published this summer:

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...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 a better than other states and to make a tragic situation less dire...According to the federal data, roughly a fifth of the state’s homes reported resident deaths from early June to mid July — a tally of 323 dead, 65 percent higher than the state’s count of 195 during that time period. Even if half that undercount had held true from the start of the pandemic, that would translate into thousands more nursing home resident deaths than the state has acknowledged. Another group of numbers also suggests an undercount. State health department surveys show 21,000 nursing home beds are lying empty this year, 13,000 more than expected — an increase of almost double the official state nursing home death tally.

Cuomo failed at the outset, finally reversed his catastrophic policy, scrubbed it from the state's website, cooked the books to downplay the resulting death toll, and is now pretending like none of it happened, lying about what's at issue. This is correct:


Fox's Janice Dean, who lost both of her in-laws to COVID in New York nursing homes, calls this new round of lies a waking nightmare:


May I also remind you that Joe Biden has specifically endorsed Cuomo's approach to COVID as a model for the country -- an incredible statement on which I have not yet seen the Democratic nominee challenged. Meanwhile, in case you missed it, Sen. Ted Cruz raised some pertinent questions on CNN with Gov. Cuomo's brother, who famously broke his own quarantine while symptomatic with the virus, then lied about it. Andrew Cuomo unleashed a flurry of attacks in defense of New York's deadly policies, repeatedly deflecting by blasting Cruz's state. New York's Coronavirus death rate per 100,000 residents is 170. Texas' is less than one-third of that, at 55 per 100,000:

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Notice how Cuomo criticizes Cruz for going after his family, as if it's unseemly to comment on the policies of a sitting governor. He also suggests that blaming New York's huge death toll on the leader of that state is unseemly, but later enthusiastically blames the president for the state's huge death toll. Sometimes, it's hard to decide which Cuomo brother is more shameless and contemptible on this issue: The politician who's actively covering up and lying about his own policy failures -- or the one who's supposed to be a journalist, repeating the same talking points?