“It’s not about pointing fingers or blaming. This has become a political football game, ”Governor Cuomo said on Friday in response to questions about Attorney General Tish James’s discovery that the state underestimated COVID-19 deaths of nursing home residents. “Who cares,” he asked, if they died in a home or hospital? “They died.”
What a cruel reaction to the deaths of thousands of elderly people, which James discovered may have occurred because of Cuomo’s March 25 mandate forcing homes to receive COVID-positive patients.
And if it doesn’t matter where they died, why did Cuomo and his Department of Health work so hard to obscure the number, blocking lawmakers’ demands and Freedom of Information files for months?
They certainly knew what it was, as health commissioner Howard Zucker finally released it the night James’ report fell: He said 12,743 nursing home residents died or are presumed to have died of COVID-19 on January 19 – validating James’ estimate of 13,000.
But earlier in the day, the DOH website had that number of 8,740. Can anyone really trust Zucker’s new numbers or is there another mistake?
Cuomo’s insane decree – which he rescinded in May – sent patients with positive viruses to the most vulnerable population in the state, as Cuomo himself noted when saying that the virus would spread in nursing homes as a “fire in the dry grass” this is what families, and so many others, care about how many nursing home residents died.
As for the government’s supposed aversion to pointing fingers, he did so himself at the same press conference: “If you think there was a mistake, then go talk to the federal government,” he said, again pretending that the feds did issue it in March order. “Where this starts is frankly a political attack by the previous federal administration” and its Health and Human Services spokesman, Michael Caputo.
Even now that his cover-up has been discovered, Cuomo still cannot apologize. He said on Friday that everyone in his government did everything they could to prevent deaths. But what he said earlier in the week was closer to the target. “Incompetent government kills people,” he said in an interview. “More people died than needed to die in COVID. That’s the truth.”
It certainly is.