Reports say governor recrafted virus death tally
ALBANY – The Cuomo administration’s reporting of COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes drew another round of criticism late Thursday after it was revealed the total death count was stripped from a state report last July.
The report released by the Department of Health last summer had long been criticized for not including the number of nursing home deaths that occurred in hospitals, leading to a drastic undercount.
Now the reason is more clear: The administration pressured the health department not to include the full death count attributed to nursing homes in the report, according to The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
The report indicated more than 6,200 nursing-home residents had died, instead of nearly 10,000 at the time who were residents of the homes and either died there or at a hospital.
The lower count allowed Gov. Andrew Cuomo to tout the state’s response to the pandemic, which has killed more than 48,000 New Yorkers. He wrote a book in October to burnish his image over lowering the state’s death count and cases.
In all, about 15,000 deaths are attributable to nursing homes or other longterm-care facilities, which per capita is actually slightly lower than the national average compared to overall deaths by state.
Cuomo’s office has fully reported the total death count in New York, but for months did not include all those who lived in nursing homes and died in hospitals as nursing home deaths.
Cuomo’s office said late Thursday that it didn’t include all the nursing homes from COVID in the July report because it wasn’t sure the data were accurate.
That was a position the administration held for months as lawmakers, the media and advocacy groups sought the information to understand the full scope of the pandemic’s toll.
“While early versions of the report included out of facility deaths, the COVID task force was not satisfied that the data had been verified against hospital data and so the final report used only data for in facility deaths, which was disclosed in the report,” Gary Holmes, spokesman for the state Health Department, said in a statement.
The state’s explanation did little to quell the latest furor over the state’s handling of nursing home deaths – both with the undercounting and a March 25 order that allowed people with COVID in hospitals to return to nursing homes.
It led to a new round of calls for Cuomo to resign or for lawmakers to move forward with impeachment as the Democratic governor is also embroiled in a scandal over accusations that he sexually harassed former female aides.
“This is criminal,” Assemblyman Ron Kim, D-queens, a top critic of the Cuomo administration on nursing homes, wrote on Twitter.
“The Gov’s top advisors pushed state health officials to strip a public report of the data showing more nursing home deaths. The changes Cuomo’s aides made to the report reveal that they had the fuller accounting of NH deaths as early as the summer of 2020.”
IOWA CITY, Iowa – An Iowa journalist faces trial Monday on charges stemming from her coverage of a protest against racial injustice, a case that prosecutors have pursued despite international condemnation from free press advocates who say she was just doing her job.
The case of Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri, who was pepper-sprayed and arrested while reporting on a clash between protesters and police, will highlight an aggressive response by Iowa authorities against those who organized and attended protests that erupted last summer and occasionally turned violent.
Sahouri and her former boyfriend are charged with failure to disperse and interference with official acts, misdemeanors that could bring fines and up to 30 days in jail. They face an estimated two-day trial at Drake University in what the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker says could be the first for a working journalist nationwide since 2018.
Sahouri’s newspaper, the Iowa Freedom of Information Council and Amnesty International are among press advocates that have demanded Polk County drop the charges, which they call an abuse of power that violate the Constitution’s First Amendment.
“This is outrageous. Reporting at a protest scene as a working member of the media is not a crime. It is a right that must be protected,” Amnesty International said.
But Des Moines police and County Attorney John Sarcone’s office have not backed down. They argue that Sahouri wasn’t wearing press credentials and appeared to be a participant in an unlawful assembly, saying journalists do not have a free pass to ignore dispersal orders. The only such order identified in court documents was issued roughly 90 minutes before the arrest.
Sahouri, recently honored by the Iowa Newspaper Association as one of the state’s best young reporters, has continued to cover public safety while
the charges loomed.
While 126 journalists were arrested or detained during 2020’s unrest, most either weren’t charged or had charges dropped, the Press Freedom Tracker says. Fourteen still face charges.
The determination to prosecute Sahouri has baffled observers, who note Iowa’s courts have a backlog of felony cases due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Sahouri, 25, was covering a Black Lives Matter protest at Merle Hay mall when tensions escalated between participants and police. Her then-boyfriend, Spenser Robnett, accompanied her for safety reasons.
Protesters vandalized a Target store, broke windows, blocked an intersection and threw water bottles and rocks at officers in riot gear.
Sahouri covered the protest live on Twitter, reporting that officers charged into a shoe store with rifles and fired tear gas to disperse the crowd.
Sahouri said she was running from the gas when Robnett was hit with a projectile and she stopped briefly to check on him before continuing around the corner of a Verizon store. That’s when officer Luke Wilson approached, shot pepper-spray into her face and restrained her with zip ties, she said.
Sahouri repeatedly identified herself as press but was jailed. She reported her arrest live from a police van.