New York State was a terrible place to live when the pandemic started. A magnet for travelers arriving from the world’s first coronavirus outbreaks, the state was too slow to close public spaces while the virus spread rapidly in March, a delay exacerbated by public disputes between Governor Andrew Cuomo and the Mayor of Nova York, Bill de Blasio. Cuomo’s decision to have hospitals send some patients from COVID-positive nursing homes back to their care facilities apparently worsened the state’s outbreak as well; in the end, New York had the second highest number of COVID-19 deaths per capita of any state, after New Jersey.
Still, Cuomo’s popularity increased during the crisis, both in his own state and nationally. It was celebrated by daily press conferences in which he used emphatic language and visual aids to provide statistical updates and public health advice – an apparent embrace of proactive, fact-based governance that many found especially refreshing compared to the ramblings of then President Donald Trump, averse to reality, held irregularly, press sessions at the White House. The results may not always have been there, Cuomo fans seemed to be thinking, but at least he was incorporating the right values.
But Cuomo, in many cases, incorporates these values only when the cameras are on. In March, he appeared in front of a New York state branded hand sanitizer showcase and announced that his people had invented a method of making the product cheaper than anything made on the open market; it turned out that the state was actually just buying the disinfectant from an outside supplier and putting it in bottles that said “New York” on them. He said the New York subway needed to be shut down for hours every night to be disinfected, a disturbing policy that still persists, although infectious disease experts concluded months ago that the coronavirus does not spread appreciably on public surfaces. Pressed in November about the type of evidence he was using to justify continuing the closure, Cuomo’s office referred a reporter to the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which was unable to provide any. This week, one of Cuomo’s top advisers tried to refute a story from the New York Times about his hostility to health experts, telling lawmakers that the governor “speaks regularly” to a prominent epidemiologist named Michael Osterholm, whom she described as one of his “Principal advisers”. On Thursday, Osterholm told PBS that although he reviewed data for the state government, he only spoke to Cuomo for “a five-minute conversation throughout my life”.
Most worrying is that the Cuomo administration admitted this month that it was excluding residents of nursing homes who died of COVID, but who technically did not die based on your facilities of your official COVID-related death count in nursing homes. Since many of these residents died only after being hospitalized, this had the effect of making the state’s nursing home outbreak look like thousands of deaths less than it actually was. Cuomo’s office appears to have compiled the most comprehensive and accurate data months ago, but did not release it until the state attorney general – who is elected independently from the governor – issued a report on January 28 claiming that deaths in nursing homes elderly people had been underestimated. (It does not appear that the discrepancy could have resulted from innocent semantic misunderstandings: a representative of the data team that manages the AARP Institute for Public Policy COVID-19 nursing home panel noted to Slate that “the CDC’s the data we use on our panel specifically states that deaths of residents must be counted regardless of the location of death, “while the editor-in-chief of the COVID Tracking Project said his team” is unaware of any other US state or territory. which reports deaths associated with nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, just as New York did for most of the pandemic. ”)
Despite his performances at the press conference, the facts and evidence show that Cuomo is not someone who cares much about facts and evidence. But his liberal supporters don’t care: a Siena College poll done after the nursing home scandal broke revealed that 83 percent of New York Democrats still approve of how Cuomo handled COVID, with more than 80 percent specifically saying that they approve of their work “Communicating with the people of New York” and “providing accurate information”. To emphasize cognitive dissonance, only 54% said he did a good job “making public all data on COVID-related deaths of patients in nursing homes”, suggesting that 54% of New York Democrats are full of it and that a significant portion of the rest of them know Cuomo he is full of it, but he doesn’t care. For many voters, celebrating the idea of the competent governor of the blue state is more important than recognizing the reality of an executive president who underperforms in series by playing three cards with corpses. At that point, Andrew Cuomo could probably shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.
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