The only thing New Yorkers can reliably expect from Gov. Andrew Cuomo is that he will blame everyone but himself for his state’s problems.
He blamed the Trump administration for New York’s alarming hospitalization rates back in March. He claimed the federal government was responsible for driving wealthy New Yorkers from the state because it didn’t give New York enough financial aid. And now he’s trying to pin his disastrous nursing home policy and his administration’s subsequent cover-up on the federal government, too.
“If you think there was a mistake, then go talk to the federal government,” Cuomo said during a Friday press conference when asked why his administration severely undercounted the number of coronavirus deaths in his state’s nursing homes. “It’s not about pointing fingers or blame. This became a political football.”
During the same press conference, Cuomo blamed former Department of Health and Human Services official Michael Caputo, arguing that New York was simply following Caputo’s federal guidance by only counting coronavirus deaths that occurred in the nursing homes themselves and excluding nursing home residents who died in nearby hospitals.
“Where this starts is, frankly, a political attack from the prior federal administration and HHS and their great spokesman Michael Caputo, who was a protege of Roger Stone,” Cuomo said. “Look, whether the people died in a hospital or died in a nursing home, the people died.”
Cuomo is right on one point: Thousands upon thousands of elderly New Yorkers died on his watch. In fact, it’s impossible to say just how many nursing home residents died as a result of his policy forcing COVID-19 patients back into long-term care facilities because Cuomo’s administration deliberately undercounted the death toll by “approximately 50%,” according to a report by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Cuomo will argue this data doesn’t matter because he knows that it proves he is at fault. It was his decision to require nursing homes to take COVID-positive patients instead of sending them to hospitals. It was this policy that allowed the virus to spread like wildfire among New York’s most vulnerable population.
Unfortunately, instead of asking the hard questions and holding Cuomo to account, the media inexplicably spent the past year rewarding Cuomo’s incompetence and allowing him to deflect the blame. Enough is enough. It is well past time Cuomo answer for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Let’s hope that reckoning has finally arrived.
