Taking a bow after a deadly decision

THERE is an old saying that if you don’t blow your own horn, there won’t be any music. Gov. Cuomo obviously is a believer, having ended his streak of 111 daily coronavirus briefings with another blast of praise for himself.

From March 2 until Friday, he held forth in marathon appearances that boosted his political ratings. Early on he hit an incredible 87 percent approval in the state and an April poll found that 56 percent of national Democrats wanted to dump Joe Biden and make Cuomo the presidential nominee.

That support reflected how skillfully the governor performed in front of the camera. He appeared to have command of the facts and used big graphics to demonstrate the flow of cases, hospitalizations and deaths. He repeated the federal mantra of “flatten the curve” to justify his historic shutdown of New York.

As time wore on, Cuomo got personal and used his mother, three daughters, CNN-anchor brother, late father and others as props. The off-topic detours, which included his method for cooking meatballs, grew weirdly indulgent, but still endeared him to viewers dubbed “Cuomosexuals.”

But there’s another old saying that also applies here — appearances can be deceiving. In this case, they certainly were because the off-camera reality is that Cuomo’s management of the pandemic response was disastrous beyond measure.

Thousands of New York’s elderly died likely because of his blunders — yet he heartlessly refuses to acknowledge a single mistake to grieving families.

His biggest blunder was the infamous March 25 Department of Health order that required nursing homes and rehabilitation centers to admit COVID-19 patients being discharged from hospitals. It stands as one of the worst decisions in New York history because it condemned the most vulnerable to hellish deaths surrounded by strangers while no friends or relatives were allowed to visit.

The order gave nursing homes no warning, no help and no way to reject contagious patients. To prevent discrimination, it even said the homes could not ask if the patients being forced on them had tested positive.

Officially, New York says the coronavirus claimed 6,200 lives in nursing homes, or about 25 percent of the state total of nearly 25,000 fatalities, but the actual total is certainly higher. Some estifor mate that nursing-home deaths are closer to 12,000.

One reason for the gap is that many of those who died were never tested. Another is that officials changed counting methods in midstream. Residents who got sick in the homes but died in hospitals were initially counted with nursing-home totals; later, their deaths were counted in hospital totals.

Although the order was wreaking havoc behind closed doors, the general public was in the dark until The Post broke the story on April 21, and the governor has been attacking The Post ever since. That day, Albany reporter Bernadette Hogan asked about the order at the briefing.

“That’s a good question, I don’t know,” Cuomo said, turning to Dr. Howard Zucker, his health commissioner. Zucker assured the media that “the necessary precautions will be taken to protect the other residents” in nursing homes.

That was the first of many lies Cuomo and his team would use in their efforts to duck responsibility and shift blame. Zucker had to know and Cuomo should have known that no precautions — zero, none — were taken to protect nursing-home residents.

Because the order took effect immediately, without inspections or even conversations with managers, the state had no idea which of the 600 long-term-care facilities had sufficient space and staff to segregate COVID-19 patients. Nor did the state know if the facilities had any protective equipment for nurses and others who would care for infected patients.

The next day, my column included a heartbreaking example of the disaster that had been unfolding for nearly a month. Long Island educator Arlene Mullin, in a letter that flagged the March 25 order and led to Hogan’s question, got right to the point.

“I am wondering who will hold Gov. Cuomo accountable for the deaths of so many older people due to his reckless decision,” Mullin wrote. “I am writing as a daughter who lost her beautiful 88-year-old mother who was receiving physical therapy at one such facility.”

Her shattering experience, we know now, was not unique then and many others would suffer similar agony in subsequent weeks. Their grief was exacerbated because Cuomo had forbidden families from visiting their loved ones since March 12, lest the visitors bring the virus into the nursing homes.

That decision, based on what happened in Washington state,

Italy, China and South Korea, showed knowledge about the extreme danger the virus presented to the elderly. Yet two weeks later, the Health Department order forcibly introduced the virus into those very same homes, where it spread like wildfire.

Despite the deadly consequences of his decision, Cuomo has resorted to an ever-shifting rationale that is a cheap, crude bid to blame anybody but himself. He has alternately pointed the finger at God, the Trump administration and nursing-home owners.

Even more bizarrely, after he rescinded the order on May 10, Cuomo continued to defend it, saying “Whatever we’re doing has worked, on the facts.” If it worked, why rescind it? Part of his defense has been to repeatedly blame The Post, especially me and fellow columnist Bob McManus, accusing us of trying to protect President Trump. He said our coverage is just “politics,” called nursing-home deaths a “shiny object” and added Post Chairman Rupert Murdoch to his list of scapegoats.

Unfortunately for Cuomo, his “fake news” charge isn’t working. PolitiFact says his claim that he was following federal guidance is “mostly false,” and other media organizations have eviscerated him the nursing-home deaths, including ProPublica. The Associated Press estimates that 4,500 COVID-19 patients were sent to nursing homes.

Even The New York Times briefly halted its hate-Trump coverage to declare that New York became the virus epicenter in part because Cuomo and others “were hampered by their own confused guidance, unheeded warnings, delayed decisions and political infighting.”

Cuomo was also spectacularly — and expensively — wrong about the need for tens of thousands of additional ventilators and hospital beds. Trump provided many of both, but most of the ventilators went unused and the Javits Center and the Naval hospital ship USNS Comfort both largely sat empty even as nursing homes burst at the seams with COVID-19 patients.

Now that his daily show is over, perhaps the governor will be honest with himself about what he did wrong. If he is, he should summon the courage to meet with Arlene Mullin, Maria Porteus, Janice Dean, sisters Aida and Haydee Pabey and other New Yorkers who lost loved ones in nursing homes.

He needs to hear their stories, and they deserve honest answers from their governor. We all do.