New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s directive forcing nursing homes to readmit residents with the coronavirus was easily one of the worst decisions made by a governor during the COVID-19 pandemic. But Cuomo is too proud to admit as much, even as he reversed that policy this weekend.
“First of all, if you look at the facts, which is always fun, you can test your hypothesis on what’s flawed. Look at how many residents we have in nursing homes, look at the percentage of our deaths in our nursing homes vis-a-vie other states, we’re down by like number 34,” he said at a press briefing on Sunday. “So, whatever we’re doing has worked on the facts.”
Let’s look at the facts then: According to the Associated Press, more than 5,000 New Yorkers have died in nursing homes. That’s nearly one-fifth of all U.S. nursing home and long-care facility-related deaths, and that number continues to grow by an average of 20 to 25 deaths per day.
At first, Cuomo blamed this number on the families who continued to rely on long-term care facilities: “Now is not the best time to put your mother in a nursing home,” he said last month. “That is a fact.”
When asked why the state wasn’t at least helping nursing homes prepare for outbreaks by providing necessary medical supplies, Cuomo argued that providing aid was “not our job” because nursing homes are privately owned.
Cuomo also blamed the healthcare system for trying to preserve as many hospital beds as possible: “At one time, hospital beds were precious. When we started this, remember, the whole question was, will you have enough hospital beds? We were in a scramble to provide more hospital beds,” he said on Sunday.
Now Cuomo is blaming the nursing homes themselves, arguing that they “could have resisted” taking coronavirus-positive patients if they did not have the ability to care for them. But, again, let’s look at the facts: First, nursing homes were not permitted even to ask whether a patient sent to them by a hospital had been tested for the coronavirus under the March 25 order. Second, the original order did not include the slightest mention of this conditional flexibility, which Cuomo has chalked up as a failure of communication.
Cuomo clearly realized that forcing nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients was a disastrous decision because he finally revised the policy this weekend. Now, hospitals “cannot discharge a person who is COVID positive to a nursing home,” and they must test every patient they discharge. Only those who test negative can now be referred to nursing homes.
This should have been New York’s policy from the get-go. We might not have known much about COVID-19 when it first broke out in the United States, but one thing we did know is that this virus disproportionately infects and kills the elderly. Instead of shielding the elderly and at-risk from this virus, Cuomo turned nursing homes into breeding grounds, knowingly sending coronavirus patients into these facilities and exposing hundreds of other residents to the virus.
Cuomo needs to take responsibility for this policy and its consequences, rather than engaging in a constant game of finger-pointing and deflection. It was he who approved and implemented this order — the nursing homes, hospitals, and New York families who depend on long-term care facilities had nothing to do with it — and now he must face the death count.
