By Pradheep J. Shanker
Wednesday, February 03, 2021
For much of the past year, the mainstream media and
Democrats have largely blamed former president Donald Trump and his
administration for most of America’s COVID-19 deaths. Trump did indeed fail in
certain aspects of coordination, messaging, and inserting politics
into the parts of the process where it didn’t belong. He deserves credit,
however, for Operation
Warp Speed, the initiative that (ultimately successfully) fostered the
development of coronavirus vaccines, one of the most successful public-private
ventures in modern history. But Trump’s overbearing personality tended to
absorb all the attention, leaving little room for real debate on the successes
and failures of other politicians, except when the media found time to
criticize Republican governors. But serious criticism of Democrats in this
period was rare.
Until now.
Last week, New York attorney general Letitia James, a
Democrat, released a long-awaited report
on the state of New York’s response to the coronavirus outbreak as led by
Governor Andrew Cuomo. Her findings were stunning in their demonstration of
both gross incompetence and outright malfeasance, and were recently reinforced
by a New York Times report this week on Cuomo’s leadership failures and
staffing troubles during the coronavirus period. The Times now reports
that nine leading health-care experts for the state of New York resigned during
the last summer and through the fall, all of whom complained that Cuomo had
politicized health-care decisions and was ignoring the experts on long-standing
plans for the pandemic, including regarding vaccinations.
It is important not to dismiss a critical fact here:
James herself is a longtime Cuomo political patron. He supported her attorney
general campaign. That someone who for years has been closely aligned with
Cuomo released this report is damning in and of itself. Yet the evidence it
contains is even worse than the report itself suggests. If anything, the media
response to it has been an underreaction.
The 76-page report
relates, in great detail, the state’s irresponsible reaction to COVID raging
through extended-care centers, primarily nursing homes. James and her team went
straight to nursing homes to obtain the data, bypassing the state’s own
data-collection entities. They took a random data sampling from 62 nursing
homes around the state and found that 1,914 of their residents had died from
COVID, 56 percent more than the 1,229 the state reported. If that sample
is truly representative of the total for New York, the state’s nursing-home
deaths total more than 13,000, where the state tallies just 8,711. (Overall New
York COVID deaths remain unchanged.)
Why the discrepancy? First, the state refused to count
those patients who were transferred to, and later died at, hospitals. Why this
loophole? Nobody has ever provided a good answer. Every other state in the
country counts these deaths in the nursing-home numbers, because that is the
practical and commonsense way to count it. New York specifically chose to be an
outlier.
The real failure, however, was New York’s unwillingness
to be transparent with the data after the fact. For many who analyzed the data
in April and May, it quickly became apparent that the state was not being fully
transparent on nursing-home deaths. Many individuals were reporting that their
family members died at the hospital, but only after getting severely ill at
their extended-care facilities first. But somehow the numbers did not appear to
bear that out.
An objective observer might be willing to give anyone in
charge during such horrific events the benefit of the doubt. New York was at
the time the worldwide center of COVID deaths, and it continued in this manner
all through the spring. The vast majority of the more than 40,000 deaths in the
state occurred during a horrific twelve-week period, when hospitals and health
professionals faced war-like situations as patients died left and right.
But amid such carnage, why not be honest about the
deaths? The answer is that, from the earliest moments of the pandemic’s arrival
to the United States, Governor Andrew Cuomo was playing political games. It has
become even more apparent in hindsight. At this point, there is no question
that some of his early decisions during the pandemic led to many of these deaths,
and worsened the situation in nursing homes. From the AG report:
On March 25, DOH issued guidance
providing that “[n]o resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the
nursing home solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. Nursing
homes are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined
medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or re-admission.”
The guidance was rescinded on May 10 in Executive Order 202.30. From March 25
to May 8, 6,326 hospital patients were admitted to 310 nursing homes. The peak
of these admissions was the week of April 14. The peak single day in reported
resident COVID-19 deaths was April 8, with 4,000 reported deaths occurring
after that date.
This was likely the worst possible decision Cuomo could
have made. First, although many feared the hospitals would be overwhelmed,
field hospitals and military-hospital ships quickly became available, but were
underutilized. As for COVID itself, we now know that patients needed around ten
days to be totally free of the virus. Furthermore, some patients who were never
symptomatic were nonetheless infectious, and they were still returned to
nursing-home facilities. There, they could quietly infect other patients and
staff. We may never know the true number of people who were infected, or even
died, from the governor’s orders.
This too, could have been excused, if Andrew Cuomo had
simply been forthcoming and admitted it was a mistake. But if he had done that,
he wouldn’t be Andrew Cuomo. In July,
his own New York State Health Department report denied
any wrongdoing relating to its March 25 order that homes be forced to
accept COVID-positive patients — though 323 facilities had no reported
infections until they took in such patients from hospitals. Even worse, this
report still didn’t provide statewide data on the matter. The report was a
clear attempt to hide data and whitewash the repercussions of Cuomo’s
ill-considered order. This has led to outside groups, such as the Empire Center
for Public Policy, to file lawsuits
demanding the Health Department release these data.
The simple reality is that the governor’s orders led to
more deaths. How many can be argued, and likely will be an area of vigorous
debate in public-health-policy academic circles for decades to come. But Cuomo
then compounded his mistake by purposefully lying and deceiving the public
about it, all the while having the machinery of the New York state government
cover for him as well.
This negligence by the government of New York is
certainly awful enough. But it’s more awful still that national and local New
York media, whose primary responsibility has always been to tell the truth and
to hold those in power to account, have been covering for Cuomo from the beginning.
Local reporters failed to ask these questions for months, as the governor held
his much-praised daily press briefings about the pandemic. There were literally
hundreds of hours of Cuomo press conferences in the first half of 2020 where
not a single question was asked about nursing homes. All the while, Cuomo got
free national airtime to voice his lies. Even during the few occasions when
such questions were raised, Cuomo attacked the press, and the answer was lost
in the muddle. Cuomo was lauded as a hero, and received not only a large book
contract (proclaiming his expertise in reacting to the pandemic no less!) but
also an international
Emmy award for his “masterful” COVID press conferences, which we now know
were made up at least somewhat of lies that resulted in thousands of deaths.
But the worst media actors in this affair are likely those at CNN. CNN employ
Cuomo’s younger brother Chris as a primetime host. The “Laurel and Hardy” act
the two brothers put on for months looks even worse in retrospect. Questions
went unanswered about the governor’s honesty over thousands of deaths, while
the governor and his brother comically bantered about their family dynamic.
In earlier times, we as a nation would simply allow the
voters to deal with Cuomo’s future, and they could decide the repercussions he
deserved. But these are not normal times. So what should the justice system do
with a governor whose actions contributed to 12 percent of all New York
nursing-home residents dying from the COVID-19 virus, with an unknown number of
other deaths and infections? Because of Andrew Cuomo’s lies, we can only guess
how many of those were because of his own ill-conceived policies. But we know
for certain that the governor was hiding data that showed his culpability.
The pandemic made fools out of many of us: scientific and
medical experts, media, politicians. And that failure itself is not enough to
indict Cuomo. But his persistence in trying to lie and obfuscate the facts of
the COVID pandemic, and even worse, his trying to make himself some exalted
national hero or beacon of science to emulate, make him one of the great
villains of this episode in American history. To fail is human. But to lie
about it, when tens of thousands of your fellow citizens died from the illness,
is a level of moral depravity and social disregard that this country should not
stand for.
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