Nursing Cuomo’s broken trust
One of the most urgent imperatives confronting soonto-be Gov. Kathy Hochul will be getting real about the state’s pandemic response. In a bid to make himself the hero of a “New York Tough” success story, Gov. Cuomo spent the past year-anda-half skewing statistics and hiding data, especially when it came to the number of nursing home residents who have died. In truth, he and his administration were fatefully slow and unsteady in their early reactions last spring — which is part of why New Yorkers suffered one of the deadliest COVID-19 outbreaks seen anywhere in the world.
Yes, the state’s public health system was caught by surprise, and yes, the Trump administration botched things, too. But that’s exactly the point. New York needs to be far better prepared to fight the next deadly virus without over-relying on the feds — and that starts with an honest assessment of where things went wrong in 2020.
It’s a big job, but Hochul can set things in motion right away with a few key steps.
Open the data vault. The state Health Department and other agencies have gathered gigabytes of facts and figures about New York’s outbreak that would be an invaluable resource for scientists and policymakers. Yet the Cuomo administration has been shamefully stingy in letting the people see their own records. It refused even to share a complete accounting of nursing home deaths until the Empire Center, where I work, filed suit and won a court order.
In March, a coalition of nine watchdog groups led by Reinvent Albany called on the Cuomo administration to release everything it had on the pandemic. When that produced no response, the Empire Center in June filed 62 Freedom of Information Law requests designed to pry loose the hidden information. All but a handful of those requests remain unfulfilled two months later.
When she takes office, Hochul should order the department to publicly post all of its COVID-related data without further delay.
Count all COVID deaths. As recently revealed by the Associated Press, the state’s official death count understates the true toll by more than 11,000. That’s because the Health Department focuses on fatalities in hospitals and nursing homes while arbitrarily leaving out people who die elsewhere, such as at home. Hochul should direct the department to give New Yorkers the full truth, painful as it may be.
Appoint a coronavirus commission. After months of misinformation from its governor and other top officials, the state needs a thorough, independent investigation to explore why the pandemic hit New York so hard and what must be done to prevent that from happening again — because this pandemic is not the last, and it is far from over.
Under her own authority or in conjunction with the Legislature, Hochul should enlist a panel of outside experts, arm them with subpoena power, and charge them with following the facts without regard to political fallout.
The probe should follow the model of the plane crash investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board — with a goal of learning from errors, identifying systemic weaknesses and recommending constructive reforms. It should not dwell on potential wrongdoing by individuals, which is better left to the ongoing probe by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn.
Come clean on nursing homes. One issue the investigative commission should particularly explore is the Health Department’s infamous March 25, 2020, directive compelling nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients being discharged from hospitals. Although the governor and his health commissioner have defended the policy as “smart” and in keeping with federal guidance, they have also stonewalled requests for the data necessary to assess its impact.
It falls to Hochul to formally disavow the policy — and clear the remaining fog about how it happened and what damage it caused. Since she had no role in its design or implementation, she shouldn’t have any objection to a clear-eyed assessment.
Fire the falsifiers. In a particular low point documented by the New York Times, the governor’s office rewrote a Health Department report last July to shave thousands off the nursing home death toll — and minimize the political embarrassment for Cuomo, who happened to be negotiating a multi-million-dollar book deal at the time.
The episode trashed the department’s credibility and did a disservice to the memories of those who died. Some of the people responsible have already quit. Hochul should remove the rest, including Health Commissioner Howard Zucker.
Had Cuomo been willing to admit his pandemic mistakes — and play a constructive role in learning from them — he might have earned some of the credit for leadership he so eagerly claimed. Instead, his denialism became the single biggest obstacle to repairing and bolstering the state’s tattered pandemic defenses.
Now, at least, he’s out of the way, and Hochul can get the reckoning started.