The slow-motion trainwreck resulting from the Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities amid the COVID-19 pandemic has finally exploded.
In yet another Republican-driven 2% culpability vs 98% culpability, this looks more and more like blame-shifting to Cuomo for what looks like a misstep based on bad information in the midst of chaos he did not create.
Cuomo is hardly innocent in acting like a politician, but give me a freaking break! That memo may have resulted in deaths, but the alternatives may have resulted in even more deaths. And Cuomo’s intention was not to make the issue go away – he was always up front about many deaths as a result of COVID in New York in the early days. Perhaps they should look more closely at DeSantis and other GOP governors who willfully downplayed COVID cooked the numbers endlessly to make the situation look better for Trump and themselves INTENTIONALLY.
Cuomo is obviously pissed and he doesn’t hide it well. That makes him an even easier target. But I’m sure it was his idea to send patients to nursing homes from hospitals. He listened to medical experts who made a tough call based on limited information. This is a witch hunt, but half the point of a witch hunt is to cast the hunted as a witch.
You know, I cannot say that Cuomo has not done anything wrong, but I am not convinced that our time wouldn’t be better spent going after someone like DeSantis who sends vaccines to high-power donors and threatens to withhold vaccines from local and county officials who criticize him, and who just refuses to report any information about deaths at all.
I live in NYS and Cuomo is not always a warm, fuzzy guy, but he fought like hell for us when no one else would, and yes, he made errors and discontinued those policies that were wrong and cost lives. But he like everyone else was learning on the fly, trial by fire, and I get sick hearing guys like DiBlasio (of all people) with their 20/20 hindsight piling on now after the fact.
We were rudderless, afraid and without guidance, and Cuomo stepped up. He made mistakes and changed course after it became apparent that some policies were mistakes, but to keep fanning this story only benefits guys like DiBlasio and wingnuts like that fake North Country congresswoman Stefanik.
I know this transpired months ago,but it brings to mind the tune “What a difference a day Makes”
"The slow-motion trainwreck resulting from the Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities amid the COVID-19 pandemic has finally exploded. "
Hard to imagine Cuomo screwing up so badly when he was getting detailed daily updates, chockful of information from the White House, the CDC / Birx, and Doc Atlas on how to best handle the situation.
Sad!
To your DeBlasio point…
Not to excuse of overlook anything untoward the governor may (or may not) have done, but I find it curious that despite the endless malevolence, malfeasance and law-breaking committed by the QOP, no bald-faced scandal or shameless criminality EVER seems to “consume” or overwhelm them…
Funny how that works…
I’m not a big Cuomo fan, but this has been kicking around on Fox for the better part of a month and I think despite some unpleasant facts, this smells a little like Faux News faux outrage gone MSM.
I understand the instinct to circle the wagons, but maybe that time writing a self-congratulatory book could have been better spent.
As they say in politics, it’s never the scandal – it’s the coverup.
Back in March 2020, this was an admittedly tough call. Hospitals in NYC were filling up rapidly. Many of the people in the hospital were the elderly. What to do? Run out of space and deal with images of people dying on the sidewalks outside ERs? Well, one could speed up their transfer to nursing homes once they were stabilized and let those facilities continue non-critical care, even if they still had Covid. What they didn’t count on is 1. having more hospital capacity than they anticipated after all, and 2. the fact that nursing homes for the most part had no serious protocols to protect either staff or other patients from Covid. Instead, thousands of elderly residents got Covid and died. What to do? At that point, Cuomo went in to overdrive to handwave it away, deflect blame, and hide the numbers, which has now come back to bite him in the ass.
Meanwhile Ron DeSantis is getting a pass for what is no doubt a conspiracy 10x worse to cover up the extent of Covid deaths in Florida.
De Blasio never knows when to keep his mouth shut. He’s on tv everywhere now, telling it that Cuomo made threatening calls all over the place, and that he’s experienced the bullying himself. Suckwa has been waiting years for his chance. Now he has it. And, oh yes, Democrats united forever again.
I don’t have a one second doubt that de Blasio wants to run for governor in '22. If at first you don’t succeed at president, try try for something else again. But he’s got about as much chance running for governor as he did running for president.
There was no “speeding up” these patients getting out of the hospitals. They were released by the hospitals when they were considered stabilized, just the way hospitals always release patients. And since the nursing homes were their, you know, homes – where else would they go? The Javitts Center wasn’t set up to take patients from nursing homes who need extensive care, and the Comfort initially didn’t want Covid patients at all.
Maybe Cuomo should have sent them to their families? Funny but I didn’t notice those people standing up and asking to save Mom and Dad from the nursing home Covid threat by taking them in at their own homes, not even after the deaths began to spike.
Some questions and comments:
Where was Cuomo supposed to release people whose permanent address was a nursing home at a time when he needed to create hospital capacity while NY was getting slammed with thousands of people getting sick from COVID? The Fed Gov’t (CMS) manages nursing homes. Don’t they have or at least share responsibility? Don’t they have the obligation to address safety in nursing homes, such as PPE supply and quarantine protocols? Did the Feds offer a place to send elderly people? Not really. While there is room to criticize Cuomo for the decision, I think the context is important. It’s not clear to me that he had a lot of other choices here at the time. His choices were certainly not illegal. Keep in mind he had a dearth of resources and information and a hostile, murderous administration to deal with.
Cuomo’s point about not including those who died at a hospital in a nursing home death toll has some merit. Place of infection vs place of death are different concepts. One can make an argument that it should all be categorized under ‘nursing homes’ but Cuomo’s position here isn’t unreasonable, and it certainly isn’t illegal.
Hiding info from Trump/Barr and waiting out a possible witch hunt: It seems to me that he was wise to avoid getting caught up in a political hit job. So long as he released the data after that threat subsided, he should be fine. It looks like after getting criticized by the AG in a formal report, his office did release the data. I don’t see a crime there. Records weren’t apparently destroyed, and it’s not clear to me what harm was caused by a delay of a few months. Someone might be able to sue, but a Judge would cap those damages I bet.
Cuomo has been getting dragged for being a self-promoter at a time when he was arguably concealing some inconvenient info about his management of nursing homes. Drag him if you want, but that’s not criminal in my view. NY pols yelling at each other with implied threats is a day ending in -y. Again, not criminal.
No Governor’s response was perfect and that has a lot to do with the Federal Gov’t’s inaction. A lot of them made some good decisions and bad ones. I think Cuomo’s delay of a lock down by a week was documented as well as this nursing home issue (though I’m not certain that there was as much flexibility as to the latter at the time).
However, he got testing ramped up faster than any Gov. He did it largely without Federal help and in spite of federal resistance. He managed the hospital load and the first epicenter crush well. He was the first to really evangelize on masks. He was the voice of the opposition to Trump. 67% of NY’s deaths happened before June 1. Only 33% since. That’s very low among most major states. He is also the only Gov, to my knowledge, who has set up a COVID vaccine site that is open and available to anyone living in the area without regard to age. He’s ahead of the game on vaccine roll out and simply needs supply. It’s quite possible that with adequate supply NY will be among the first states to hit critical mass on vaccinations.
As I surmised in another tag, had NYS ignored the Fed reporting requirements and shifted deaths in hospitals to deaths in nursing home, the same crew of jealous and bruised and indecisive and partisan NY pols would have probably accused Cuomo of under-reporting hospital deaths to protect hospitals.
This is petty and the reporting is even more petty. Interviewing opponents ot Cuomo on the facts is not reporting. Every story should start with the sentence that NYS did not undereport Covid deaths, unlike most Republican states. Period.
I agree. Trump was out to punish New York anyway and I’m certain that given the chance, Trump would’ve gone after Cuomo for showing real leadership at a time when Trump was too busy playing golf. Plus most New Yorkers hate Trump and didn’t vote for him.
Can’t help but feel this is payback time for Trump and his minions, along with a little help from NY Dems who want a whack at Cuomo and his less than diplomatic personality. I was always a little amazed at how the public did a 180 on Governor Cuomo during his ‘popular’ period, that is when he was the only rational voice keeping the public informed during the initial Covid surge. And frankly, he did a great job during those daily press conferences.
Definitely looks as if a mistake was made during the death tally (nursing home vs hospital numbers) but as Cuomo stated (although inartfully expressed) where these people died is secondary to the fact that they did, in fact, die of Covid, a pandemic that Trump and his goons insisted was no worse than a seasonal flu.
And that positive attention aimed at Cuomo and the man’s rising poll numbers pissed Trump off no end, along with Cuomo’s criticism about the Administration’s lame-ass response. The shortage of ventilators, for instance, and the lack of basic PPE.
So, we have Trump’s insatiable thirst for vengeance and other Dems who look in the mirror and see a brand new Governor of NY. Though we’re all worn out by elections and campaigning, 2022 is just around the corner.
There is no such thing as coincidence in Politics World.
I don’t quite get all the Cuomo defenders here. Sending people with COVID back into the most vulnerable population was a pretty terrible idea. Granted, there weren’t a lot of great alternatives and people were still figuring things out back then. I’m pretty forgiving toward public officials’ mistakes back in Feb and March 2020. But Cuomo should have owned up to the mistake instead of covering it up. And the “I will destroy you” quote sounds plausible. Even during the darkest days of the crisis in NY he couldn’t help but get into pissing matches with De Blasio and general pettiness. It’s also interesting to note that while Gavin Newsom is getting hammered for his COVID response, New York’s death rate per million from COVID is TWICE as high as California’s.
I think this is right, though nursing homes are most directly regulated/licensed by the state. The feds are only involved insofar as Medicaid pays for a lot of nursing home care and they have to meet some minimum standards. Even in the best of times, many nursing homes are badly understaffed, often with immigrant labor whose language skills and ability to advocate for themselves are not great. They didn’t have PPE, there was no regular testing, different companies and facilities enforced rules differently, – it was a clusterfuck. Was it one Cuomo could have knowingly avoided or fixed? The people accusing him of deliberately killing grandma need to honestly answer how they would have made a different call given the available information and the situation at the time.
Some years ago my father stayed at one of the NYC facilities that had a lot of deaths last year, while recovering from a stroke. It was under different management then and seemed like a decent place, but they’re all kind of shady given that they’re run by for-profit corporations looking to maximize profit.
He’s now living permanently in a nursing home abroad, but had to be hospitalized last year due to various issues, and when he recovered and returned, he was first tested and put in isolation for nearly a week. So it is possible to return patients back to their nursing homes safely, it just has to follow proper protocols. Were they followed here?
I’m not a fan of De Blasio but Cuomo is a freaking asshole, and deeply insecure. He simply cannot stand anyone else having the spotlight. He’s a little like Trump that way, only smarter and not as evil. It’s so obvious that he needs to steal De Blasio’s thunder and make him look bad. It’s almost like watching Veep. He simply can’t stop thinking about his public image and being front and center. Dafuk is wrong with that guy? That said, we haven’t had a “normal”, decent governor since I don’t know when. Oh, right, Mario Cuomo. My how the son has fallen far from the tree.