Cuomo aide admits they hid nursing home data so feds wouldn’t find out https://t.co/lbH53CORKv pic.twitter.com/OX94iKM0gn
— New York Post (@nypost) February 11, 2021
Melissa DeRosa, Secretary to New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo, confessed this week that the administration has under-reported state nursing home deaths due to Covid19 by nearly half, and that the under-counting was politically motivated.
In a leaked conversation, Melissa DeRosa, one of Governor Cuomo’s top aides, admitted that data was withheld on nursing homes, where more than 10,000 New Yorkers have died during the pandemic. This could be problematic #understatement https://t.co/8jNqOkIr08
— Michael Keegan (@mjkeegan1127) February 12, 2021
The action was taken, DeRosa says, to hide evidence from U.S. Justice Department officials who had begun investigating the state’s handling of nursing home deaths, and to keep Donald Trump from getting credit for correctly assigning blame for the disastrous effects of the Covid19 pandemic to the state’s Democratic leadership.
DeRosa made the admissions in a conference call with Democratic lawmakers this week.
“He starts tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes,” DeRosa says of Trump during the call. “He starts going after [New Jersey Gov. Phil] Murphy, starts going after [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom, starts going after [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer.”
Then, DeRosa says, Trump “directs the Department of Justice to do an investigation into us. And basically, we froze. Because then we were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us while we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation…that played a very large role into this.”
DeRosa begged for understanding from fellow Democrats asking for “a little bit of appreciation of the context” the actions were taken in.
The Cuomo administration has yet to issue any public apology or an apology to the families of those who succumbed to the disease because of the policy.
The only apology issued seemed to be one to other Democrats for placing them in politically compromising situations during an election cycle. “So we do apologize,” DeRosa said. “I do understand the position that you were put in. I know that it is not fair. It was not our intention to put you in that political position with the Republicans.”
Early on in the Covid19 outbreak Cuomo issued an executive order barring older patients from being refused entry into nursing homes based on their suspected Covid19 status.“No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of Covid-19,” the order stated. Inexplicably, the order also made it illegal for nursing homes to test any resident returning from a hospital for Covid19.
Hospital administrators, not doctors or nursing home staff, were given authority to deem patients fit for transfer to nursing homes and to decide which patients would be transferred.
The results were devastating.
By last summer about 20% of New York State’s 30,000 overall Covid deaths were estimated to have taken place in nursing homes.
Those numbers would have been bad enough, but nursing home staff said at the time they were being suppressed, and that state government was covering the real numbers up to prevent the real extent of the effects of the policy from being known.
In August the Department of Justice announced that it had requested data from four Democrat governors on their orders to send sick Covid19 patients to nursing homes.
The Cuomo administration responded to this, and other requests for data, by saying the information would be provided no sooner than November 5 – nearly three months after the original request date – and after the presidential election.
As late as the end of January the New York State Department of Health had publicly acknowledged only 8,711 deaths in nursing homes due to Covid19. This week the State reported the number is actually 13,297. It jumps to 15,049 when data from assisted living/adult care facilities is included.
The architect of the policy was New York State’s Health Commissioner Howard Zucker. Zucker was once the highest-ranking American in the WHO, an organization President Trump withdrew the U.S. from last year and one Joe Biden announced two days after his inauguration he was directing the U.S. Federal Government to rejoin.