He's at it again. Gov. Andrew Cuomo refuses to acknowledge that his March 25 mandate that demanded nursing home facilities accept recovering COVID patients had anything to do with the thousands of fatalities that have since been tallied in New York nursing homes.
"Yes, people in nursing homes died," Cuomo said in his interview with NBC's Willie Geist on Wednesday. "And they attacked me and all the Democratic governors with that."
Who they should have been attacking, apparently, are the nursing home staffers who showed up to work every day to care for ailing residents.
"We’ve done a full study of it, the virus came into nursing homes from the staff," the governor said.
Cuomo also argued that, by percentage, New York's loss was "much, much less" than other states.
The problem is, it's highly likely that we don't have the right numbers. As has been reported, New York is the only state in the country that doesn't take into account nursing home residents who died from COVID after being transferred to the hospital. If they didn't die on nursing home property, they weren't counted.
.@NYGovCuomo blames nursing home staff for “bringing” Covid into their facilities.
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 14, 2020
"We’ve done a full study of it, the virus came into nursing homes from the staff." pic.twitter.com/8sw4ALIqBr
Cuomo claims that he didn't force these facilities to accept COVID patients.
"There was never a directive that said: 'We will send COVID positive people back to nursing homes.'"
The directive, which you can read here, Cuomo insisted, only said that facilities should accept the patients if they had the capacity to care for them. But as many witnesses have attested, the pressure from the Cuomo administration made these facilities feel as though they had no choice.
But hey, at least Gov. Cuomo has now finally admitted that in retrospect, he would not have signed that March directive. Not because of the lost lives, but because of the "political issue" it created.
"Would my Health Department have followed the federal guidance? Obviously not, knowing the political issue it was going to create," he said. "But there was no issue in reality...because we never did have a scarcity of beds."
Cuomo has argued that his administration was simply following guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention when he signed the mandate. PolitiFact rated that assertion "mostly false."
Fox News senior meteorologist Janice Dean thanked Geist for being one of few reporters who are at least trying to get answers out of Cuomo.
God bless @WillieGeist who is one of the only journalists that presses @NYGovCuomo about the nursing home tragedy. Everyone else lets him get away with it.
— Janice Dean (@JaniceDean) October 14, 2020
Dean has also been keeping track of all of the people and things that the governor has blamed for the nursing home tragedy. You'll notice that the one obvious culprit is not on the list.
Recap: @NYGovCuomo has blamed God, Mother Nature, @mgoodwin_nypost @nypost, @NewYorkGOP, @CDCgov, POTUS, @FoxNews, nursing home workers, visitors and the residents themselves for his deadly nursing home executive order that’s been scrubbed from his health dept website.
— Janice Dean (@JaniceDean) October 14, 2020