By Kyle Smith
Friday, February 12, 2021
Two weeks ago, a Democratic attorney general of New York
who had enjoyed Andrew Cuomo’s backing released a tentative preliminary report
that gingerly suggested the actual death toll from COVID-19 in the state’s
nursing homes was “approximately 50 percent” higher than Cuomo’s numbers had
all led us to believe.
Experienced Cuomo watchers scoffed: Despite being labeled
a “bombshell” in the media, the AG report was obviously soft-pedaling the
reality. Attorney General Letitia James is well aware of the potential hazards
of incurring Cuomo’s wrath and seemed to be at pains to make the report as
bland as possible. It sampled only 10 percent of state nursing homes.
The actual numbers keep rising, and now the estimated
death toll from COVID in nursing homes is 62 percent higher than Cuomo was
claiming just last month. Cuomo’s disastrous March 25, 2020, order that nursing
homes must accept COVID-infected individuals, which was not rescinded until May
10, may have been the single worst policy blunder made by any American official
during the pandemic.
Making matters worse, Cuomo has worked furiously to cover
up the facts for nearly a year. His own aide, Melissa DeRosa, acknowledged as
much in a call to state Democratic lawmakers in which she blatantly admitted
hiding the truth for fear of political repercussions. “We froze” out of fear
that the truth would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors, DeRosa said
in the call, whose details were reported by the New York Post, one of the few news outlets that has declined to put
on a cheerleader skirt and shake its pom-poms at every Cuomo press conference.
Back in August, state lawmakers tried to extract more
information from Cuomo about the true death toll in nursing homes, but Cuomo
stonewalled his own legislature because Donald Trump exists, DeRosa explained.
As with so many other matters, urging Democrats to frame everything as a
question of how much they hate Trump was a method for avoiding inconvenient
truths about Democratic actions: “Right around the same time, [then-President
Trump] turns this into a giant political football,” DeRosa is heard complaining
on the recording of the discussion. DeRosa pleaded with her own party’s
legislators to consider the potential damage to the party had the truth become
known. Trump “starts tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes,” DeRosa
said. “He starts going after [Democratic New Jersey governor Phil] Murphy,
starts going after [Democratic California governor Gavin] Newsom, starts going
after [Democratic Michigan governor] Gretchen Whitmer.” And he even “directs
the Department of Justice to do an investigation into us,” DeRosa added. “And
basically, we froze.”
Far from it. Cuomo was preening, not freezing: Appearing
on television virtually every day, writing a book boasting about his
leadership, telling an adoring news media that New York had led the way on
coronavirus strategy.
On July 24, a New
York Post reporter asked Cuomo whether he would support a nonpartisan
investigation of state nursing-home deaths. The answer was no (how dare you even ask, silly reporter).
Instead of saying this, Cuomo issued this classic non-answer, an incantation of
hated names in lieu of transparency:
I don’t believe your categorization
is correct. I believe it is a political issue. I think it is the New York Post. I think it’s [Post columnist] Michael Goodwin, I think
it’s [Post columnist] Bob McManus. I
think it’s Fox TV. I think it is all politically motivated. If anybody looked
at the facts, they would know it is wholly absurd on its face. . . . First, go
talk to the Republican states now — Florida, Texas, Arizona — ask them what is
happening in nursing homes. It’s all politics.
To recap, as of last month Cuomo acknowledged only that
8,711 nursing-home residents died of COVID. After James’s report, which
confirmed suspicions that Cuomo wasn’t counting the many nursing-home residents
who were taken to hospitals and then died there, the official tally rose to
12,743. This week, that number jumped to 14,100, according to figures
uncovered by Freedom of Information Law requests by the Empire Center for
Public Policy that include confirmed and presumed COVID fatalities for
nursing-home clients, whether those deaths took place within those homes or
off-site. That’s 5,389 deaths linked to nursing homes that Cuomo hid — double
New York’s death toll from 9/11.
New York and its close cousin New Jersey still have the
two worst COVID death
tolls among U.S. states, and both have far higher death tolls than any
country on earth. (Belgium has suffered
more than any other country, with 1,876 COVID deaths per million; in New
York and New Jersey those figures are 2,330 and 2,510, according to Statista.)
All of them happened after Cuomo shrugged off the COVID threat (“The facts
defeat fear. Because the reality is reassuring,” he said on March 2, adding,
“Excuse our arrogance as New Yorkers” but “this is not our first rodeo” so “we
should relax”). The virus, we later learned, was then rampaging through the
state. Yet on March 6 Cuomo added, “the overall risk level . . . remains low.”
Cuomo, the media’s favorite cynosure, the man who inspired a drooling Trevor Noah to proclaim himself a “Cuomo-sexual,” was treated to a series of why-are-you-so-awesome CNN interviews with his brother Chris and won an Emmy for his act, no longer looks quite so much like St. Andrew of the Hudson. The state GOP chair is calling for his impeachment, 40 percent of New Yorkers said in a poll this week they’d like to recall him (they can’t; no such provision exists in state law), and even some of his media enablers are beginning to change their tone. Meanwhile, Cuomo continues to discover new ways to blunder, erecting unnecessary regulatory barriers to vaccine distribution. How many lives has Andrew Cuomo cost us? How many will die unnecessarily as he micromanages the vaccine rollout? Now that political reporters can no longer spend twelve hours a day discussing Trump’s latest Twitter gibe, perhaps they will take more interest in such questions.
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