Andrew Cuomo

“New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top aide [Melissa DeRosa] told Democratic lawmakers that the administration took months to release data revealing how many people living at nursing homes died of COVID-19 because officials ‘froze’ over worries the information was ‘going to be used against us.’… In recent weeks, a court order and state attorney general report has forced the state to acknowledge the nursing home resident death toll is nearly 15,000, when it previously reported 8,500 — a number that excluded residents who died after being taken to hospitals.” (AP News)

“New York state Assemblyman Ron Kim accused Gov. Andrew Cuomo Wednesday of threatening to ‘destroy’ Kim's career in retaliation for Kim criticizing Cuomo’s handling of Covid-19 in nursing homes.” (Forbes)

Many on both sides condemn Cuomo and call on the New York legislature to take action:

“The Cuomo administration apparently feared legal jeopardy — and federal persecution, if not prosecution — over the data so, at best, it slow-walked releasing it to avoid that fight. To be clear, that doesn’t necessarily mean the administration would have faced legitimate legal jeopardy over the data, but the reasoning is still, at best, an inadequate justification for a failure to be accountable and transparent about public-health data during a public-health emergency, regardless of the consequences. And DeRosa’s explanation wasn’t even a public justification — or a public apology — but offered in private to a small group of Democratic lawmakers who had been forced to defend the administration.”
(Chas Danner and Matt Stieb, New York Magazine)

“There were nursing homes in New York at the start of the pandemic that were trying to refuse reentry to residents who tested positive for the novel coronavirus. It was Andrew Cuomo, acting under the extraordinary executive emergency powers granted to him by the state [legislature] that ordered all of the homes to accept returning residents and forbade them from requiring a negative COVID test as part of the process. Cuomo also threatened non-compliant nursing homes with crippling fines or the loss of their license to operate. So while some of the nursing homes were clearly failing to take all possible precautions, even the ones who were trying to do the right thing were forbidden from doing so.” (Jazz Shaw, Hot Air)