Cuomo ordered the nursing homes both to take residents back and to take new residents regardless of Covid status. He is now makes several arguments. 1) This caused no additional deaths since Covid was already present in the nursing homes at better than 95 percent. This makes sense when you start thinking about how the residents got Covid in the first place. 2) It was CDC policy at the time. Here the argument is that made by the poster above – clearing spaces in the hospitals was better than having people dying while waiting for spaces although the then surge was not as bad as anticipated partly due to Cuomo’s relative success in persuading people to take the right precautions. Cuomo further argues that as 34 in number of nursing home deaths (presumptively using the correct numbers) New York did better than average.
All the deaths were reported at the time at the place where they occurred. This obscures what the risk of being in a nursing home was. And that is where the true problem is: both citizens and the legislature were deprived of the information they needed to correctly assess the danger of dying from Covid acquired at a nursing home. For the citizens this alters rhe decision as to whether it wiser to stay home or go to a nursing home. It may have altered which policies the legislature supported.
Legislators are understandably furious with Cuomo but this idea that they should take the decision making capacity away from Cuomo and give it to a ten person board of legislators is absurd – no such board can act anywhere fast enough. Better would be to give themselves the ability to override Cuomo’s decisions with a supra majority.
Which may well be a function of percentage the population in congested cities and what was known at the time the pandemic hit each state rather than who was making the best policy choices.
That’s what tests and isolation are for. It works. Apparently it wasn’t done in these cases, and lots of people died needlessly. Fuck yeah it was Cuomo’s job to oversee that. Who was his state medical director and who was in charge of overseeing nursing homes and quarantines and testing? Just because it was early days doesn’t excuse this.
Let’s remember this is about the counts and where the counts were allegedly supposed to emanate from. The counts, in sum, didn’t change, the venue associated with the counts is what is being disputed. I think it looks like a “tempest in a teapot” and has no bearing on the management of the virus spread.
States were fighting Trump to get masks, let alone test you had asymptomatic cases running around a home, adding a bedfast case properly contained was not apt to greatly increase the degree of danger.
What would have been better but probable not doable without the DPS would be to confiscate a number of nursing homes and concentrate all the Covid cases in them. A chain could have done that for itself but it never happened.
New York’s death rate per million from COVID is TWICE as high as California’s.
The death rate in New York City is what put New York State over the top. Not only is it the most densely populated city in the country – with more than double the population of Los Angeles crammed into less than two thirds of Los Angeles’ land area – New York also has this thing called the subway. The most extensive transportation system in the country, NYC’s subway pre-Covid ridership stacked up at about 8 million rides a day every Monday through Friday, with passengers breathing on each other all the way to their jobs and then back again, from anywhere from about a five minute hop to a good hour’s commute – at the very time the virus was seeding in January, February and half of March of last year.
Yes Cuomo made some mistakes, de Blasio as well, but the death rate was baked into the future here from the second the virus disembarked with passengers at JFK. But sure, let’s blame Cuomo for everything.
Yes, and they always had the option of taking their loved one home. By no means am I minimizing how difficult that would have been, but it was an option. Cuomo made a tough call under tough circumstances and that isn’t a crime.
That said, he should have come out from the start with transparency and defend the policy, which was quite defensible. Point out that there weren’t a lot of alternatives. He hurt himself by not being out front right from the beginning.
And let me add: Show me anywhere in the world, not just the US, where the nursing homes didn’t account for a huge share of deaths. That was certainly the case everywhere in Europe. Hundreds of staff come in every day and testing can only catch some of the infected. If a virus is raging in the community, there is no 100% certain way to keep it out of nursing homes.
I don’t comment much here (performance anxiety, mostly), and usually only show up on Elise Stefanik threads but this is relevant. As an upstate NYer, I can guarantee she’s using this debacle to prep her bid for NY Governor: if you can stomach it, she’s left a trail over on her Facebook page. Cuomo is really unpopular up here and I’m angry at him for making this easy target available even though I feel there wasn’t much he could do at the time.
I never said the death rate was a dispositive indicator of a public official’s COVID performance but it is a data point. I also indicated that I’m pretty forgiving of early mistakes as we were feeling our way around the pandemic, but Cuomo’s missteps were especially catastrophic. (Trump’s were much worse, but that’s setting the bar awfully low. ). Sure, NY is crowded and dependent on mass transit and that made things worse. But the last time I checked, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore were crowded and mass transit dependent as well.
