ALBANY, NY (AP) – New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has written a book on how to manage the COVID-19 crisis. Now he faces increasingly intense accusations that he has covered the true death toll from the pandemic in nursing home residents, attacks that challenge his reputation for accurate shooting skills and may obscure his political future.
State lawmakers called for investigations, depriving Cuomo of his emergency powers and even his resignation after new details emerged this week about why certain data on nursing homes has been kept confidential for months, despite requests from lawmakers and others.
Adviser Melissa DeRosa told lawmakers that the data was delayed because the authorities are concerned that the information “would be used against us” by the Trump administration’s Justice Department.
The new salvos of Cuomo’s Republicans and fellow Democrats marked a major upheaval since the early days of the pandemic, when Cuomo’s daily instructions helped cement a national reputation for leadership. The briefings, in which he promised to present “just the facts”, earned him an International Emmy and helped lead to his book, “American Crisis”.
“He interfered, more than a little. It would be bad enough if it had been publicized and he was not celebrating publicly, and being celebrated, for having dealt with the pandemic, ”said Jeanne Zaino, professor of political science at Iona College. “But, leaving that aside, it doesn’t get any more serious than that. You are talking about the death of 15,000 people. “
For months, the Cuomo administration dramatically underestimated the number of COVID-19 deaths across the state among long-term care residents. There are now almost 15,000, against 8,500 previously reported.
The new figure comes to about one-seventh of the approximately 90,000 people who lived in nursing homes in 2019 in New York, which has one of the largest nursing home residents in the country.
Cuomo pointed to a small but growing body of research suggesting that the uncontrolled spread of the community is the biggest factor in outbreaks in nursing homes, and he said that inadequate federal government assistance with travel restrictions, testing and protective equipment has left New York City and its particularly vulnerable suburbs.
He considered criticism to be political and noted that the deaths of thousands of nursing home residents in hospitals have always been counted in the state’s overall count.
“He died in a hospital, he died in a nursing home – they died,” he said on January 29.
The uproar may not have the same impact on the third-term Democrat as it would have if he were reelected for the first time this year, Zaino said. But that may lessen the likelihood that he will be chosen for a position in the Biden government.
And Cuomo – who says he will run again in 2022 – now faces criticism that comes increasingly from members of his own party.
“The governor’s lack of transparency and the blocking of his government’s nursing home actions are unacceptable,” said state senator John Mannion, one of 14 Democratic senators who said on Friday that the expanded emergency powers of Cuomo should be revoked as soon as possible.
The highest death toll was not released until hours after a report at the end of last month by Democratic state attorney general Letitia James examining the government’s failure to include nursing home residents who died in hospitals. The updated figures corroborate the findings from an Associated Press investigation last year that concluded the state could be underestimating deaths by the thousands.
Defenders and relatives of nursing home residents questioned whether the spread of the virus in nursing homes was driven by a state directive of March 25 that prohibited facilities from refusing people just because they had COVID-19. The guideline was intended to free up space to fill hospitals quickly.
Debra Diehl, 62, who lost her 85-year-old father, Reeves Hupman, to the presumptive COVID-19 in May in a nursing home outside Albany, wants to know why Cuomo and the state have done no more to separate the residents who can had the virus, perhaps putting them in field hospitals.
“They had people coming in, sent from hospitals in the state,” said Diehl. “It looked like typhoid marias, just spreading even more. He didn’t know what he was doing or he didn’t care ”.
In response to a request for Freedom of Information from the AP in May, the state Department of Health released records this week, showing that more than 9,000 patients recovering from coronavirus in New York were released from hospital to nursing homes from March 25 to May 10, when Cuomo broke the guideline.
The state issued a report insisting that patients did not transmit the virus to nursing homes, although it did not rule out whether the guideline played any role..
Cuomo said the facility has a responsibility to accept only patients they can care for. State health inspectors found violations of infection control in dozens of nursing homes in the midst of the pandemic and charged at least $ 1 million in fines.
Still, DeRosa estimated that New York nursing home residents make up 40 percent of the lives lost this winter. New York has recorded more than 10,000 deaths since December 1.
Disclosing DeRosa’s comments this week in a conference call with Democratic lawmakers basically took months of complaints to a boiling point.
She said the state “froze” in responding to the August legislators’ request for the number of nursing home residents who died in hospitals because authorities were also responding to a Justice Department inquiry and worried that “what we started the saying would be used against us, and we were not sure if there would be an investigation. ”
DeRosa released a statement on Friday saying the state was slow to respond to lawmakers because it was dealing with the Department of Justice and then with the resurgence of the virus in the fall and vaccinations. The governor’s office declined to comment further.
“It gave the impression that they were trying to cover up the information,” said Senator Rachel May, one of 14 Democrats who called for the termination of Cuomo’s emergency powers.
Republican Senate leader Rob Ortt said Cuomo “needs to demand the immediate resignation of anyone involved in this cover-up and, if he knows, he should be removed from office.”
Criticism can resonate because it fits the common claim that, for all his skill, Cuomo’s controlling nature can undermine his effectiveness.
Cuomo dismissed this idea, writing in his book: “You show me a person who is not in control, and I will show you a person who is probably not very successful”.
For the political scientist at Fordham University, Christina Greer, the recent disclosures “call into question: can we trust the news coming out of the governor’s office? Not just outside nursing homes, but can we trust this about schools, can we trust prisons, can we trust other communities?
“It definitely cast a negative shadow on the government,” she said.
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Peltz reported from New York.