I get the whole idea of hiding covid deaths. The covid deaths were all reported however the debate was “nursing home/ long term care facilities” or died in a “hospital”. I never understood this scandal however if you want to investigate and open up DOJ investigations then it will soon be “time for Desantis to be in the barrel”. He has a lot of explaining to do.
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Certainly a factor, but NY and NYC specifically, remained open long after it was obvious there was a serious problem.
“That is not going to happen, shelter in place, for New York City,” Cuomo said, “For any city or county to take an emergency action, the state has to approve it. And I wouldn’t approve shelter in place.” - 3/18/20
Of course they did, after it was too late.
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Excellent thought(s)! I, for one, would be up for a run from NY Attorney General Letitia James, esp. if following on a successful string of tRump (crime) family and related prosecutions and convictions.
It’s only half-jokingly used here in Jokelahoma, and I’ll bet elsewhere, that “AG” really stands for “aspiring Governor”! 
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Can’t. Need kindling.
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Shelter in place was seen as radical at the time and he was later to it, but many states have never even gotten around to that, or even masks, so why is Cuomo being hammered for his approach to a novel, once in 100 years situation when he clearly was one of the biggest advocates in the country for the sick and the healthcare workers? Imo, Cuomo can be criticized for a lot of stuff, but his pandemic response is not one of them. It makes his opponents look like idiots because everyone saw him on TV every day, fighting for all the East Coast states. It’s not gonna work. People tend to believe their lyin eyes.
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I’ve always admired Josh and TPM for not falling for sensationalism and am disappointed that they’re just parroting what other lazy media have been putting out.
Not all states made public the total number of nursing home residents who died. Arizona, for example, only reports the number of facilities with deaths. Yet there’s no mob carrying pitchforks and torches coming for their governor.
New York’s reports of nursing home deaths made clear that they only included people who died in nursing homes, not nursing home residents who died in hospitals. People who understood public health understood the limitations of the data. If New York did not have full confidence in the accuracy of the number of nursing home residents who died in hospitals, then they were right to withhold it. Even adjusted “50% higher”, New York’s nursing home death percentages (15k/48k=31%) are within range of other states (say, Florida at 10k/31k=32%.)
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They concealed from the public the number of nursing home residents who were dying of covid. That they didn’t (so far as we know) attempt to monkey with the bottom-line figures doesn’t change the fact that they attempted to hide some important stuff.
You’re still a murderer, even if there’s people you didn’t kill. And you still concealed data from the public, even if there are other data you didn’t conceal.
The obvious and important context here is that NYS made a policy decision, early on, to require that nursing homes admit covid-positive patients.
That was a tough call, and at the time it wasn’t obvious which way to go. Some states did it one way, some did it the other. Everyone was, I think, trying to make the best decision they could, but the data just weren’t clear yet, and people had to rely to a significant extent on instinct.
As the pandemic progressed, it pretty quickly became clear that the decision to send covid+ patients into nursing homes was, however reasonable and well-intentioned, a catastrophic error.
That’s the context around this fiddling with the data. They got this wrong, didn’t want to take their lumps over it, and tried to hide the fact by reporting numbers that made nursing home deaths look like not nursing home deaths.
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During late March & in April I made sure to watch Cuomo on his daily news conferences every day. It was like therapy for me and it was a calming influence compared to the orange clown in DC. I will always appreciate this however he stepped in it with the harassment claims. No chance of any cabinet post or higher office in a future democratic administration.
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I totally agree. They weren’t cooking the books. They were being accurate to a fault. It wasn’t dishonest as much as they were being elusive about the origins.
I agree with that. Everyone was flying by the seat of their pants. There are a whole lot of things we’re going to look back on and realize should have been done vastly differently. That’s the nature of life in a crisis. Also, the decision to ask NYers to shelter in place had to be even tougher than just about anywhere else in the country. Asking KYians to do so when even HUD housing is several hundred sq. ft. is one thing, but many NYers live in spaces about the size of one of my walk-in closets.
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My daughter got into an argument with one of her MAGAt friends about this & I had saved something about him just following CDC recommendations by doing this. I can’t seem to find it now, of course.
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As a former data analyst from the healthcare realm, have to politely disagree.
It’s a fairly common saying that if you ask two data analysts for a number, you will get at least three different answers, all of which are “correct”.
Data definitions matter. They did report at the time that they were reporting deaths which happened in nursing homes, which was a true number.
This “new” number is total residents of nursing homes who died, regardless of where. Also a true number.
If you want scandal, let’s go to Florida, where they actively undercounted deaths.
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“New York’s decision to pull out the hospital-based deaths was not based on standard practice,” she said, noting that federal rules for reporting covid nursing home deaths require that states include off-site deaths in hospitals.
New York’s unorthodox exclusion of hospital deaths was always noted in the fine print on the data sheets. But the governor didn’t offer a disclaimer when he boasted of the state’s better-than-average performance based on an incomplete count.
I don’t want scandal. I want the truth. And Florida isn’t relevant here. Your instinct to play the “not as bad as” game isn’t creditable.
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The thing is, I think a lot of people don’t understand how fragile some of these nursing/retirement home residents are, how much care they need. You can’t just put them in a hotel and leave them to their own devices. And, in a pandemic of the size we experienced, there simply were not enough people to care for the elderly, especially outside of a nursing/retirement home facility.
I actually represent one of these facilities, and the City would not even take any action when our residents refused to shelter in place, and kept wandering the streets, going about their business. We were begging for some action because of the risk to other residents, and the City and the police said there was nothing they could do. So I have no idea what people think Cuomo should have done with nursing home residents who had covid. I’d like to hear some suggestions for the future, along with all this criticism.
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And that’s pretty huge to forget to mention. This particular scandal is going to get a lot worse. Its not just sites towards his donors, its now looking like he has been arranging to give vaccinations directly to donors, regardless of their eligibility.
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Granting that everything you say is true as far as it goes, that doesn’t answer the charge that’s being made here.
Let’s grant that the decision as to whether or not to require nursing homes to admit covid+ patients was a very difficult one. Let’s grant, arguendo, that even with the benefit of hindsight that was the best decision that could have been made.
None of that excuses an attempt to make nursing home deaths look like not nursing home deaths, by adopting non-standard data practices.
I wouldn’t be complaining if the Cuomo people forthrightly presented their data, and then argued that they did the best that they could under trying circumstances. But monkeying with the data gets right up my nose. It’s dishonest, it’s unethical, and they deserve every bit of flak they’re getting over it.
Borderline journalism malpractice there.
The initial Medicare rules about reporting only came out in May 2020, via an Interim Final Rule, you can find the whole thing here: https://www.cms.gov/files/document/qso-20-29-nh.pdf
So the following reports from last summer are Monday-morning quarterbacking, after all the deaths had already happened, about how to define and understand what happened.
It’s not like he was covering up things while they were happening, like happened in Florida. This was all about differing interpretations of how to describe what was already done.
And there are legitimate arguments on both sides here. Is it the “fault” of a nursing home if, after a month on a ventilator in a hospital, a person dies? Where do you put the “blame”?
Were the Medicare rules themselves meant as a political hit, trying to make certain places like NY look worse, by lumping in anyone who even drove by a nursing home into tallies (hyperbole)? Not like we had senior folks at HHS or anything running around trying to make Democrats into the demons or anything during the trump administration.
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That nuance is key and should never have been toyed with. Cuomo fucked up big time and in service of self, not the public. Hes gotta go. If we can’t clean our own house we have no business demanding it of the far worse filth littering the GOP’s.
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Florida’s numbers are probably questionable, however. So not a good comparison. Florida started reclassifying infections and deaths as early as April. We didn’t have people dying from COVID, we just had an inexplicable gigantic spike in people dying from the common cold.
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I agree on the analysis, but that “new number” is far less politically advantageous than the old number.
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Which is why they pushed back.
Their counting back in March and April at the height of things was legitimate and correct based on the rules at the time.
Then Medicare came in with a new rule in May. Based on the new rules, that would have doubled their stuff or so and made it look far worse.
Kind of like if you played the last Superbowl, Tom Brady threw all those touchdowns, and, after the final whistle, the refs announced that fouls were worth three points, and thus the Chiefs won by 1,000 points.
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