While conservative media has been consistent in highlighting the disastrous March 25 nursing home policy from Cuomo that jammed COVID-stricken patients into the state’s long-term care facilities, the New York governor was promoted to celebrity icon among leftists in the corporate press for his aggressive pursuit of draconian lockdowns. All along, Cuomo’s state has led the U.S. with the highest coronavirus death rate in the country, a feat accomplished in no small part by Cuomo’s nursing home policy, which is estimated to have sent nearly 6,500 patients to an early grave.
New revelations related to the governor’s early actions on New York nursing homes have now provoked a long-anticipated reckoning on Cuomo’s pandemic leadership. According to data unearthed in a Freedom of Information Act case brought by the conservative think tank Empire Center, Cuomo was manipulating the numbers on nursing homes to underestimate the devastation of his nursing home policy while he paraded around the country to brag about pandemic triumph. Subsequent reporting from The New York Times found the nursing home death toll in New York at more than 9,000.
Yet Cuomo is far from the only U.S. governor who implemented a deadly nursing home policy forcing coronavirus-infected patients into close contact with the population’s most vulnerable. And it’s become clear that the reason for this policy is money: “The hospital lobby directly engineered this approach, and these governors obliged.”
