Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo testified before a congressional subcommittee to answer questions about how he handled the COVID pandemic, especially nursing home deaths. While official transcripts of Cuomo’s testimony should be released in the coming weeks, the former Empire State Governor did not shy away from being on the Congressional hot steat.
"Today is an opportunity to get the truth and the facts out, and I welcome that opportunity," Cuomo said before the hearing. He accused COVID critics of ‘weaponizing’ the justice system to target Democrats over the pandemic and said he was "proud" of how New York handled the health crisis.
New York State Conservative Party Chairman, Gerard Kassar, said in advance of Cuomo’s testimony, “More than 13,000 New York seniors died as a result of former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s ill-conceived COVID policies, and his lack of contrition is deafening.”
“It defies logic for anyone that you would mandate nursing homes, who were not capable of taking these COVID-positive patients,” House COVID subcommittee member Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) said before the hearing.
South Shore Press took a look into the timeline and origin of the COVID directives to put the situation into some context.
Former Governor Cuomo declared a statewide State of Emergency on March 7th, 2020. Cases quickly escalated and New York City became the epicenter of the early wave of COVID in the United States.
On March 20th, then-Governor Cuomo issued ‘Matilda’s Law’ named after his mother, to protect vulnerable populations including the elderly. It severely limited visitation and substantially increased required protective measures in all health facilities.
In a contradictory measure, five days later, on March 25th, Cuomo ordered that nursing homes "must comply with the expedited receipt of residents" coming from hospitals, regardless of whether they are infected. The order said that "no resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the nursing home solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19."
This directive placed the elderly stricken with COVID back into nursing homes around previously healthy senior citizens, which many believe led to the deaths of thousands.
By May 10th, Cuomo rescinded the order requiring nursing homes to accept COVID patients. At the time, Cuomo said over and over that his order, requiring nursing homes to keep and accept COVID patients, was in line with U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-issued guidance.
This assertion by Cuomo was not true.
The CDC guidelines said that a medically stable COVID patient could be discharged from a hospital to a nursing home "only if the nursing home can implement all recommended infection control procedures."
The CDC set a two-pronged guidance in place on March 23rd, two days before Cuomo’s order, and yet he issued his directive anyway. It was clear by then that most nursing facilities did not have the infection control measures in place to accept already vulnerable, and now COVID-positive, patients.
Further, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal regulator of nursing homes, also issued guidance.
Back then, CMS pushed back on Cuomo’s claim that the state followed federal recommendations citing their March 13th guidance that says that “nursing homes should only accept those patients for which they can care.”
On May 21, after the New York Department of Health failed to release numbers on nursing home deaths, the Associated Press released a story that the state’s true nursing home death total could be over 11,000, much higher than the 6,600 New York State was reporting.
From this point forward, the blame game and dueling statistics became the dance between the Cuomo administration, federal health officials, the press, and the public. Cuomo made claims that criticism of him was “all politics and motivated by conservative media outlets.”
Janice Dean, a Fox News weather forecaster who lost both of her in-laws to COVID in nursing homes, asked in a New York Post Editorial “Where is this federal guidance compelling state governments to pack care facilities with COVID patients? How does Cuomo explain that the majority of other states in the union did not carry out this practice?”
At the time, Governor Cuomo defended his decisions saying, “I’m not going to get into the political back and forth, but anyone who wants to ask, why did the state do that with COVID patients in nursing homes? It’s because the state followed President Trump’s CDC guidance," Cuomo said.
PolitiFact rated this statement by Cuomo as “Mostly false”.
The Cover-up
Questions mounted as conflicting information about the nursing home death count was released. New York Attorney General Letitia James released a report in January 2021 revealing that Cuomo had understated the COVID death toll in nursing homes by as much as 83%.
The nursing home death scandal broke on February 11th, 2021, when the New York Post reported that Melissa DeRosa, a Cuomo aide, privately apologized to lawmakers for the administration withholding the nursing home death toll. The reduced number was not an accident or a mistake. DeRosa said they did so “in fear President Trump would turn this into a giant political football”.
DeRosa said, “Basically, we froze because then we were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice or what we give to you guys and what we start saying was going to be used against us, and we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation.”
By March 2021, it was discovered that Cuomo’s top aides had rewritten a state health department report omitting 9,200 COVID nursing home deaths.
The political and public relations clashes between Cuomo’s political machine and the health officials ran on for months and nine health department officials resigned.
Cuomo still defended his handling of the crisis. He claimed that his administration did not cover up the number of nursing home deaths but did acknowledge that officials should have released the information earlier.
By November 2021, the New York State Assembly found that Cuomo's executive chamber had "substantially revised" the report to exclude deaths of nursing home residents at hospitals to, in their words, “boost Cuomo's reputation."
Congresswoman Malliotakis hopes the House subcommittee can shed some light on what happened and when, saying, “I think that we’ll have a lot more clarity as to what led to that deadly mandate that thousands of seniors died,” she concluded. “The difference is that CDC guidance had made a recommendation that certainly was not a mandate.”
The Justice Department did not recommend Cuomo for prosecution based on the March 25th, 2020, “must admit” order, but the New York Bar Association and Empire Center for Public Policy determined that Cuomo’s directive led to hundreds of additional deaths.