Taking no blame & feeling no shame
5,400 nursing-home deaths, but gov ‘did everything I could’
Despite the deaths of nearly 5,400 nursinghome residents and calls for a probe of his policies that mandated the facilities take in coronavirus patients, Gov. Cuomo insisted Wednesday that he and his officials “did everything we could” to protect the most vulnerable New Yorkers.
“As a society, you can’t save everyone, you’re gonna lose people — that’s life,” Cuomo said at a press briefing in soon-to-reopen upstate Watertown. “But we did everything we could.”
Cuomo repeated that conscience-clearing mantra, or a close variation of it, six times in a matter of seconds when grilled specifically about a dearth of diagnostic tests making it impossible for some nursing homes to comply with his new edict that all workers be screened twice weekly.
The governor mandated the stepped-up screening on Sunday, also ruling that hospitals can no longer discharge patients to nursing homes unless they’re free of COVID-19.
The change curbed — partly, but not wholly — a widely criticized March 25 Department of Health directive barring nursing homes from turning away coronavirus patients.
Bipartisan calls have mounted for probes into what role that policy had in the 2,752 confirmed and 2,646 presumed COVID-19 deaths logged in nursing homes through Tuesday, representing more than 5 percent of the state’s nursing-home population.
“We have to look at that death number every day,” said Cuomo, referring to state fatalities overall. “The only way you put your head on the pillow at night is you say, ‘I did everything I could.’
“I can look you in the eyes and say, ‘We did everything that we could.’ ”
That “everything we could” effort has included telling nursing homes, “It’s not our job” to provide personal protective equipment, clearing coronavirus-infected nurses to work at one upstate facility and an ongoing state-attorney-general probe — not into Cuomo or his Department of
Health, but into nursing homes.
All the while, nursing homes statewide — some of them with no coronavirus diagnoses before the March directive — have descended into hellish conditions, with little government help beyond body bags.
Cuomo’s claim of clean hands raised eyebrows on Wednesday.
“If you make a mistake, admit it and don’t repeat it,” said Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Queens).
“Did they do everything they could?” asked Kim, whose district includes the Sapphire Center for Rehabilitation & Nursing of Central Queens, which had three confirmed and 50 presumed coronavirus deaths. “That’s a clear no.”
Cuomo’s office responded with a statement attacking Kim’s credibility.
“A politician who doesn’t know what they’re talking about has little use to their constituents,” said Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi. “The assemblyman should know that we provided nursing homes with more than 10.5 million pieces of protective equipment, access to more than 95,000 volunteers, which 400 of 600 homes used, and the actual facts on the [March 25] policy.”
But Kim wasn’t the only lawmaker to slam Cuomo’s handling of nursing homes.
“These [directives] are not foisted upon these institutions by anyone else,” said state Senate Minority Leader John Flanagan (R-LI). “The March directive came from the state of New York and created significant problems.
“Those issues in nursing homes are not going away,” added Flanagan. “They created these problems and now they’re trying to fix them.”
Asa society, you can’t save everyone, you’re gonna lose people — that’s life.
— Gov. Cuomo