N.Y. GOVERNOR’S AIDES REWROTE NURSING HOME DEATHS REPORT

Data was concealed for months to obscure true toll

Top aides to Gov. Andrew 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 rewrote the report to take it out, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The intervention, which came just as 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.

After the state attorney general revealed this year that thousands of deaths of nursing home residents had been undercounted, Cuomo finally released the complete data, saying he had withheld it out of concern that the Trump administration might pursue a politically motivated inquiry into the state’s handling of the outbreak in nursing homes.

But Cuomo and his aides actually began concealing the numbers months earlier, as his aides were battling their own top health officials, and well before requests for data arrived from federal authorities, according to documents and interviews with six people with direct knowledge of the discussions, who requested anonymity to describe the closed-door debates.

As the nursing home report was being written, the 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 Health Department worked on the report with McKinsey, a consulting firm hired by Cuomo to help with the pandemic response. The chart they created compared nursing home deaths in New York with those in other states. New York’s total of 9,250 deaths far exceeded those of the nexthighest state, New Jersey, which had 6,150 at the time.

The changes sought by the governor’s aides fueled bitter exchanges with health officials working on the report. The conflict punctuated an already tense and devolving relationship between Cuomo and his Health Department, one that would fuel an exodus of the state’s top public health officials.

A lawyer hired to represent Cuomo and his aides, Elkan Abramowitz, has begun interviewing senior staff members in the governor’s office about the nursing home report, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions.

The aides who were involved in changing the report included Melissa DeRosa, the governor’s top aide; Linda Lacewell, the head of the state’s Department of Financial Services; and Jim Malatras, a former top adviser to Cuomo brought back to work on the pandemic. None had public health expertise.

In response to a detailed list of questions from The New York Times sent Tuesday, the governor’s office responded with a statement Thursday night from Beth Garvey, a special counsel, who said “the out-of-facility data was omitted after D.O.H. could not confirm it had been adequately verified.” She added that the additional data did not change the conclusion of the report.