The Corner

Health Care

Once Again: It’s Not Florida That’s Cooking the Books, It’s New York

Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D., N.Y.) speaks at an event in the Bronx, N.Y., March 26, 2021. (Carlo Allegri/Reuters)

It’s truly remarkable: Whatever Governor DeSantis is baselessly accused of doing, Andrew Cuomo or someone else seems actually to have done. From the New York Times this afternoon:

The effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office to obscure the pandemic death toll in New York nursing homes was far greater than previously known, with aides repeatedly overruling state health officials over a span of at least five months, according to interviews and newly unearthed documents.

Mr. Cuomo’s most senior aides engaged in a sustained effort to prevent the state’s own health officials, including the commissioner, Howard Zucker, from releasing the true death toll to the public or sharing it with state lawmakers, these interviews and documents showed.

A scientific paper, which incorporated the data, was never published. An audit of the numbers by a top Cuomo aide was finished months before it became publicly known. Two letters, drafted by the Health Department and meant for state legislators, were never sent.

The actions coincided with the period in which Mr. Cuomo was pitching and then writing a book on the pandemic, with the assistance of his top aide, Melissa DeRosa, and others.

There is no cover-up in Florida. It is a conspiracy theory with no basis in reality. In New York, however . . .

The full data on nursing home deaths was not released until this year, after a report by the state attorney general in late January found that the official tally might have undercounted the true toll by as much as 50 percent.

That was something Mr. Cuomo’s aides had known since the previous spring, The New York Times found.

Of course.

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