When you write a book in the middle of a crisis entitled American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic like Andrew Cuomo did you are just begging the political gods to come get them some. Falsify the reported deaths from your nursing home order by 50% at the same time you are writing said book, as the New York Times is reporting, and you deserve every bit of whatever hell comes your way.
Top aides to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo were alarmed: A report written by state health officials had just landed, and it included a count of how many nursing home residents in New York had died in the pandemic.
The number — more than 9,000 by that point in June — was not public, and the governor’s most senior aides wanted to keep it that way. They rewrote the report to take it out, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.
The extraordinary intervention, which came just as Mr. Cuomo was starting to write a book on his pandemic achievements, was the earliest act yet known in what critics have called a monthslong effort by the governor and his aides to obscure the full scope of nursing home deaths.
After the state attorney general revealed earlier this year that thousands of deaths of nursing home residents had been undercounted, Mr. Cuomo finally released the complete data, saying he had withheld it out of concern that the Trump administration might pursue a politically motivated inquiry into the state’s handling of the outbreak in nursing homes.
But Mr. Cuomo and his aides actually began concealing the numbers months earlier, as his aides were battling their own top health officials, and well before requests for data arrived from federal authorities, according to documents and interviews with six people with direct knowledge of the discussions, who requested anonymity to describe the closed-door debates.
The central role played by the governor’s top aides reflected the lengths to which Mr. Cuomo has gone in the middle of a deadly pandemic to control data, brush aside public health expertise and bolster his position as a national leader in the fight against the coronavirus.
As the nursing home report was being written, the New York State Health Department’s data — contained in a chart reviewed by The Times that was included in a draft — put the death toll roughly 50 percent higher than the figure then being cited publicly by the Cuomo administration.
The Health Department worked on the report with McKinsey, a consulting firm hired by Mr. Cuomo to help with the pandemic response. The chart they created compared nursing home deaths in New York with other states. New York’s total of 9,250 deaths far exceeded that of the next-highest state, New Jersey, which had 6,150 at the time.
The changes sought by the governor’s aides fueled bitter exchanges with health officials working on the report. The conflict punctuated an already tense and devolving relationship between Mr. Cuomo and his Health Department, one that would fuel an exodus of the state’s top public health officials.
That is why you maintain change tracking on such things, and backup copies in other places.Report
it’s definitely a sign of a steamroller style of management that he published a book on managing a crisis during the crisis he was managing/”managing” and no one could stop him. having had a boss like that once, it is infuriating and maddening and the only good feeling that will ever come out of this kind of interaction is the mild panic in their eyes when you resign. (maladaptive daydreaming is not positive, even if it is cathartic)
speaking of steamrollers, after he’s done wrecking his career cuomo should do a podcast with spitzer called “hand me that petard”. sheldon silver can call in from upstate…Report
He. Needs. TO. Go. And. Never. Come. Back.Report
Wasn’t this story broken in June?Report
Yes, but the election had not yet happened.Report
Before the election this story was just the insane ravings of conspiracy theorists!!!Report
I always look for the addition of an extra adjective to turn a “seriously, we have questions…” to “that’s a crazy conspiracy theory”.
“Alexander Acosta said that he was told that ‘Epstein belonged to Intelligence’.”
“You believe that there’s some Satanic group of Pedos that the CIA is keeping tabs on? What? You a QAnon follower or something? Hey! When do you think that JFK Jr is going to storm the Capitol?”
So just notice when a particular criticism gets restated poorly and additional adjectives get tacked on.Report
We joke, but even I discounted these stories last summer. Partly because good policy won’t correlate to good outcome when dealing with something as random as a virus, but partly because of the political climate. I just assumed this was an example of two groups reading the same data differently for political advantage.
I lost a distant family member back then. He was old, so the family didn’t think anything of it; he was also in a NY elder care facility. It’s unsettling. I’m so temperamentally opposed to conspiracy theories that I discounted all of this. State government policies may have caused the death of a relative, and I didn’t even think about it because the state officials were lying and I believed them.Report
First – sorry for his death. Most if not all of them were collectively preventable.
Second – both side of the aisle were bamboozled about this in NY. Its why I keep chanting that he needs to go. Now.Report
Not the right-wing nutballs. They called this one.Report
Are these the same right-wing nutballs that later decided that COVID-19 was no big deal and that the government was exaggerating death counts, or are these largely disjoint sets?Report
Daily Caller yes, Daily Wire no. Other sites and programs vary.Report
It was pretty well-known over the summer that NY was reporting nursing home deaths differently than other states, namely that they were counting as “nursing home deaths” death that occurred IN nursing homes and that nursing home residents who were transferred to and then died in a hospital were counted in the general death toll. And it was pretty well-known that NY’s nursing home deaths were so high because Cuomo required that nursing homes admit residents who had tested positive, to avoid them being “discriminated” against.
Now, if this report is just confirming the how and what and when and why, then it isn’t necessarily old news but it isn’t quite the bombshell it is being reported as.
The real “bombshell” is that most folks just ignored this information because it didn’t fit the narrative of “Cuomo Crushing” that so many folks were engaging in and now that the bloom is of the rose and Cuomo is an acceptable target again, everything is sticking and sticking hard.
Now, if this is evidence of further malfeance above and beyond the deadly nursing home policy and the sketchy reporting of numbers, well then, the fire is going to get much hotter.Report
I agree completely, Kazzy. This was common knowledge last summer. The real news seems to be the about-face on the dominant narrative being peddled on the masses.Report
The sexual harassments claims look like the real deal. Two worked with him closely and the 3rd was at a social event where we have photos of him touching her. All three pass a basic sanity check.
We could have a dozen more in a few months.Report
Yes, but this really isn’t about that.
The sexual harassment claims need to be investigated and evaluated entirely on their own merits. I don’t care if he singlehandedly managed the Covid situation perfectly and saved a billion lives. If he harassed women, that’s wrong. Full stop.
As others have alleged, if these claims were made before but ignored because of the Cuomo Crushing, that’s wrong. If the women sat on the claims because they feared going after a beloved and powerful politician and felt more empowered to speak out when he is in an embattled state, that would be a sad state of affairs but again doesn’t impact the veracity fo their claims, which should be investigated fully.Report
And now we have 2 more for a total of 5. They also pass basic sanity checks.
https://nypost.com/2021/03/06/two-more-women-accuse-gov-andrew-cuomo-of-inappropriate-behavior/Report
Beside the point, but that’s a 1/3 change, not a 50% change. The natural interpretation of “Cuomo Aides Changed Nursing Home Death Report Rates By 50%” is that they reported half as many deaths as actually occurred, while in reality they reported 2/3 as many deaths as actually occurred.Report
Gotta love headline writers trying to be cute!Report
I said it in the last post…he’s vulnerable now…that’s why this is coming out. This was kept quite but since he’s weaker now, it’s coming out. And it’s likely he’s not needed as an “anti trump” politician made out to be a star.as Biden is now pres. Can’t have anyone steeling Biden’s thunder or running against the future pres candidate: vp harrisReport
As noted above the original reporting was in June.Report
Yes, originally reported and nothing else happened….did it? NOW, now it’s got legs. That was pre election. Why? What changed? His situation that’s what.Report
Political scandals never grow legs . . . until they do. But to insinuate – as commenters here and elsewhere keep doing – that this is something NEW and DIFFERENT is hogwash.Report
“But to insinuate – as commenters here and elsewhere keep doing – that this is something NEW and DIFFERENT is hogwash.”
I wasn’t insinuating that.Report
Hoo boy.
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So the NYT will break this story in, what, November?Report
Eh, probably run with the #MeToo stuff instead. Better to argue about entitled cis-het white dudes who have Mediterranean backgrounds and cultural differences when it comes to touching than stuff that is in the ballpark of 1920’s Eugenics Policy.Report
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April. Of 2020.Report
Honestly?
I don’t have a problem with him sending senior-care facility residents back to those facilities.
Hospitals are not long-term senior-care centers, and there was no way to make them be.
Now. If the senior-care centers in question were dormitory-style warehouses with everyone in the same room, or didn’t follow proper protection practices to keep COVID patients from spreading their disease to non-infected residents? Right, that’s bad, and it’s something the state government should have paid attention to. If you want to say “they could have made sure it was done properly, with an understanding that the care facilities’ procedures would have to change and a mandate for that to happen and inspection to make sure it did, but instead they just let the hospitals kick everyone out and didn’t care what happened next”, sure, you can say that, because it’s exactly what happened. But “send them back to the care facilities” is not inherently a bad idea.
If nothing else, what were the hospitals supposed to do? Stick ’em all in closets until whenever-the-rona-is-over?Report
What do we do now?
Probably the hospitals aren’t supposed to find housing for everyone they release, and the highly vulnerable to COVID elder care places aren’t expected to accept people that will kill people there.
I think we’re into “everyone is different” territory. If it happened to my grandparents today (ignoring that they’re dead), presumably they hide in my parents’ basement for two weeks.Report
I understand what he was going for and I guess I agree with it, as far as it goes.
It’s the “mandatory” and “cover up the numbers” part that stick.Report
Related:
Pressure ratchets up on Cuomo after New York Assembly speaker OKs impeachment investigation
(CNN)New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo faced mounting political pressure on Thursday after the speaker of the state Assembly authorized the judiciary committee to begin an impeachment investigation and dozens of Democratic New York state lawmakers called for Cuomo to resign.Report