Governor Cuomo Stays Mum as COVID-19 Nursing Home Scandal Blows Wide Open

While we may very well be at the beginning of the end of this lengthy and frustrating COVID-19 pandemic, there is still plenty to worry about.

Perhaps the cases are dwindling, and the vaccines are arriving in increasing numbers, but now, with our clearer minds, it is time to take a look at our response to the disaster and decide what went right. And, more importantly, it’s imperative that we examine what went wrong, too.

In New York State, there are concerns that some of the decision making done by Governor Andrew Cuomo cost lives, and at nursing homes, no less.

Unbelievably, the Governor appears unwilling to address the issue.

An Albany-based watchdog group says that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s nursing home directive was likely responsible for more than 1,000 additional resident deaths during the coronavirus pandemic, despite numerous denials by the administration that their order was heavily to blame.

Cuomo’s office has been silent on the contents of the report released by the nonprofit Empire Center for Public Policy on Thursday and reviewed by Fox News, which relies on the information provided to them by the New York State Department of Health (DOH). The governor is facing intense backlash over the scandal, including a federal probe into his administration’s handling of the crisis. The focus on Cuomo comes as liberal CNN and the governor’s brother, host Chris Cuomo, have given the Democrat’s controversies little to no airtime. Previously, the network gave Chris Cuomo free rein to conduct friendly, comical interviews with the governor, who wrote a book about successfully handling the pandemic in the middle of the pandemic.

The numbers were staggering.

The watchdog group’s analysis, which compared the death rates at facilities that admitted COVID-19 patients discharged from hospitals to the rates at others that didn’t, suggests the controversial mandate by Cuomo is “associated with” more than one in six of 5,780 nursing deaths statewide between late March and early May.

“Statewide, the findings imply that COVID-positive new admissions between late March and early May, which numbered 6,327, were associated with several hundred and possibly more than 1,000 additional resident deaths,” the report said.

New York was one of the epicenters of the early American pandemic experience, with Cuomo taking a great deal of criticism for exploiting his daily news conferences to weigh in on unrelated, presidential politics.