› Cuomo aides hid nursing home death toll for months
NEW YORK — The effort by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office to obscure the pandemic death toll in New York nursing homes was far greater than previously known, with aides repeatedly overruling state health officials over a span of at least five months, according to interviews and newly unearthed documents.
Cuomo’s most senior aides engaged in a sustained effort to prevent the state’s own health officials, including the commissioner, Howard Zucker, from releasing the true death toll to the public or sharing it with state lawmakers.
A scientific paper, which incorporated the data, was never published. An audit of the numbers by a top Cuomo aide was finished months before it became publicly known. Two letters, drafted by the Health Department and meant for state legislators, were never sent.
The actions coincided with the period in which Cuomo was pitching and then writing a book on the pandemic, with the assistance of his top aide, Melissa DeRosa, and others.
As the first wave hit New York in March 2020, the administration put in place a policy to prevent nursing homes from turning away patients discharged from hospitals after treatment for COVID-19. Some critics blamed the approach for the large number of resident deaths in the spring, a toll that the administration then put at around 6,000.
But by the time the policy was rescinded less than two months later, it had become clear that not all the deaths were being included in that tally; those who died after being transferred to hospitals were not counted as nursing home deaths. Lawmakers and others began asking for a complete count, but the governor’s aides said parsing the numbers was difficult.
The full data on nursing home deaths was not released until this year, after a report by the state attorney general found that the official tally might have undercounted the true toll by as much as 50%.
That was something Cuomo’s aides had known since the previous spring, The New York Times found.
Elkan Abramowitz, a lawyer representing Cuomo’s office, said the administration was reluctant to release numbers it did not believe were reliable.
The Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing home death data now is the subject of a federal investigation, one of at least four overlapping inquiries. As of this month, more than 15,500 nursing home residents with COVID-19 have died.