Cuomo Aides Rewrote Report To Hide Nursing Home Deaths Before Book Release

Top aides of Democrat New York Governor Andrew Cuomo rewrote a report written by state health officials that included the number of New York nursing home residents that had died from COVID-19, according to the New York Times.

The New York Times reported, “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 continued. “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,” the Times added.

The book Cuomo was working on while his administration worked hard to suppress how poorly New York had dealt with COVID-19 is titled “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic,” and its description praises Cuomo for how he “was relentless in his pursuit of scientific facts and data.”

“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,” the New York Times added. “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 Cuomo administration’s suppression of data on nursing home deaths came after a directive from Governor Cuomo that barred nursing homes from refusing people who were infected with COVID-19.