Cuomo advisers altered report on coronavirus nursing-home deaths: WSJ

Top advisers to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo influenced state health officials to remove data from a public report that showed coronavirus-related nursing-home deaths in the state had exceeded numbers previously acknowledged by the administration, a bombshell report says.

Details about the July report were disclosed Thursday night in a story first published by The Wall Street Journal.

The final report focused only on nursing-home residents who died inside those facilities and did not include nursing-home residents who were transferred to hospitals after becoming sick, the Journal reported.

That means the state’s reported tally of 6,432 nursing-home resident deaths was significantly lower than the actual nursing-home death toll, sources with knowledge of the state report’s preparation told the newspaper.

State officials now place the nursing-home and long-term-care facility death toll in New York at more than 15,000 residents, the Journal reported. The number represents deaths since March 2020 of residents confirmed to have contracted the coronavirus or presumed to have contracted it, the report said.