Andy’s 12K-deaths lie
Hochul's true toll bares depth of his coverup
The tally of New Yorkers killed by the coronavirus pandemic stands at more than 55,000 people, the state Department of Health confirmed late Tuesday — far more than the 43,000 claimed by now ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
DOH officials released the revised tallies just hours after Gov. Kathy Hochul was sworn into office, finally bringing the state’s death count into line with figures long published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Johns Hopkins University.
“We’re now releasing more data than had been released before, publicly, so people know the nursing-home deaths and the hospital deaths are consistent with what’s being displayed by the CDC,” Hochul told MSNBC Wednesday morning. “There’s just a lot of things that weren’t happening, and I’m going to make them happen.
Transparency will be the hallmark of my administration.”
Government-watchdog groups applauded Hochul’s move.
“It’s a good first step by Hochul,” said Bill Hammond, health-care policy expert at the conservativeleaning Empire Center think tank, which aggressively pressed state officials over their handling of nursing-home safety measures during the pandemic.
“The higher COVID death totally is significantly important,” he added. “She’s acknowledging how bad things got . . . Cuomo was trying to keep the numbers as low as he could.”
The new figures show the number of COVID-related deaths in New York state as of Tuesday at 55,395.
It’s a significant jump from the 43,415 that would have been reported under the old system, which only tallied deaths in hospitals, nursing homes and adult-care facilities.
The disclosure triggered a new round of demands from critics of the Cuomo administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic for the sacking of embattled state Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker.
“Zucker is 100 percent implicated in Cuomo’s coverups. Zucker executed Cuomo’s defrauding of the public,” said Assemblyman Ron Kim, one of the most vocal critics of the ex-governor’s handling of COVID-death data. “Not only does Zucker have to be let go, he has to be held accountable.”
A Cuomo spokesman claimed late Wednesday that the ex-governor had been forthright with the numbers. “New York always reported these numbers and they were always publicly available,” said Rich Azzopardi.