Cover Up In Plain Sight

In Plain Sight

For many months, lawmakers and journalists alike have pressed Governor Andrew Cuomo and his administration for more transparency on the number of COVID-related nursing homes deaths. He’s dodged. He’s lashed out. He waited for everyone to drop it and move on — but that was never going to happen.

The excuse was that federal prosecutors would use the data as a bludgeon in a politically motivated investigation. While there is truth in describing the Trump administration’s inquiry as partisan, that excuse doesn’t explain why New York State’s own Democratic legislators were rebuffed when they asked for the same information.

Mr. Cuomo has tried to draw a distinction between people who died in nursing homes of COVID-19, and those who caught the virus in nursing homes and later died after being transferred to a hospital. It’s a distinction without a difference. These were all nursing homes deaths, and they should have been reported as such from the beginning — but definitely were not. The Express News Group’s own requests to the state for local nursing home fatality data went unanswered.

It was, essentially, a cover-up in plain sight.

In March 2020, Mr. Cuomo infamously mandated that nursing homes accept medically stable COVID-19 patients who were discharged from hospitals, even if they still tested positive for the virus. It was the height of the pandemic in New York, and hospitals needed the beds for patients who were still suffering from the most severe symptoms.

It wasn’t until May when the governor changed that policy to require negative COVID-19 tests before a patient could be transfered from a hospital to a nursing home. A state report followed in July, finding that COVID-19 was introduced into nursing homes by asymptomatic infected staff members, and peak staff infections correlated with peak nursing home resident deaths. It also stated that most recovering COVID-19 patients who still tested positive were not contagious at that stage.

That July report looked favorably upon the governor’s policy and cast no blame. But what would a report look like from an agency that doesn’t answer to that same governor?

The governor made a difficult choice in the midst of a deadly pandemic that, in hindsight, can be labeled a mistake that cost lives. The attempt to whitewash and cover up that fact is ultimately more worrisome than the initial error. It deserves all the scrutiny it’s getting, and more.