COVID Cuomo

On March 25, 2020, New York governor Andrew Cuomo made the single deadliest mistake of the coronavirus pandemic: forcing nursing homes to accept elderly patients who had already tested positive for COVID-19 and barring those homes from requiring any tests for admission.

To what extent the governor’s pernicious decision accelerated the spread of the coronavirus may never be fully known. Its immediate impact on New York’s most vulnerable population, however, was catastrophic. Yet, with the help of the compliant media, Cuomo would engage in one of the most odious displays of political opportunism in re­cent memory, de­flecting, dissembling, and covering up his incompetence.

Last summer, the Cuomo administration reported that 4,800 New Yorkers had died of COVID-19 in nursing homes from March to May of 2020 — approximately a quarter of all the state’s COVID-19 fatalities. That was a lie, and we would later learn that the number was likely closer to 12,000 deaths, all told.

By May 2020, a handful of reporters had already begun questioning whether New York was deliberately undercounting its nursing-home fatalities. Before April, New York had, like every other state, reported all nursing-home-resident deaths from COVID-19, whether they had been transported to hospitals or not. As New York’s death toll mounted and threatened Cuomo’s reputation, New York health commissioner Howard Zucker shifted to reporting only deaths that happened at nursing homes as nursing-home fatalities, no longer including those who died in medical facilities. The discrepancy would be in the thousands.

Was the new reporting policy implemented at the governor’s behest? No one knows. The Cuomo administration wouldn’t even divulge the real nursing-home fatality stats when asked by the Associated Press. Cuomo, in fact, initially blamed health-care workers — our heroes on the front lines! — for “bringing” COVID into their facilities. “We’ve done a full study of it. The virus came into nursing homes from the staff,” he said.

For nearly a year, Cuomo’s preternatural ineptitude was enabled by national media. A person might get irritated by watching Cuomo discuss his global popularity on The Tonight Show or by listening to him explore the phenomenon of “Cuomosexuals” on Ellen. Then again, those interviews seemed like enhanced interrogations compared with the treatment he received from various cable-news networks covering his press conferences, or from CNN, where his obsequious brother kibbitzed with him night after night after night.

Cuomo would go on to win an Emmy Award “in recognition of his leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic and his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.” A litany of celebrities — Robert De Niro, Billy Joel, Ben Stiller, Spike Lee, and others — showered the governor with hosannas. Billy Crystal noted, “In the darkest days of the pandemic, your daily briefings live from New York gave us hope, gave us clarity, gave us the truth, and gave us something that we were not getting from Washington: leadership.”

Conservatives roundly mocked Cuo­mo’s Emmy win, but it was perhaps his most deserved honor. Cuomo’s well-produced pressers might have been a Potemkin village, but the façade of confidence, scientific certitude, and proficiency was a useful juxtaposition with President Trump’s frequent and incoherent ramblings and antagonistic COVID updates. One of the nation’s great political mediocrities proved that winning over pundits and reporters was more vital for one’s reputation than saving lives. If you allowed yourself to be used as a cudgel against Republicans — not just Trump, but Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas — all the better.

It didn’t matter that Florida and Texas had been less restrictive than New York and yet outperformed Cuomo’s state in fatality rates, hospitalizations, and nearly every quantified measure. Some people might argue that COVID was uncontainable in any state. Not these media people. Every COVID flare-up in a red state was blamed on the incompetence or nefariousness of governors — a “death cult,” more than one liberal publication would call it — while New York would be celebrated as an exemplar of efficacious and scientific policy in action, no matter how devastating the actual results.

“I find myself fantasizing about the New York governor becoming the party’s nominee,” Bret Stephens of the New York Times admitted. “He didn’t lie,” explained Andy Slavitt, a regular cable-news expert and now the White House senior adviser for COVID response. “He didn’t sell. He didn’t pat himself on the back. Or avoid responsibility. We had that already. He told the hard truths. He showed data. He asked for help. He demonstrated some empathy and some effort. And the country needed that.”

Contra Slavitt, Cuomo incessantly patted himself on the back. From design­ing a bizarre retro poster celebrating his state’s allegedly successful pandemic response — under the banner of “Love Wins” — to informing a national audience during the virtual Democratic Party National Convention: “Our way worked. And it was beautiful.”

Well, I suppose it was beautiful for Cuomo, who cashed in on a book deal. American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic provided “an impressive road map to dealing with a crisis as serious as any we have faced,” glowed Jeff Greenfield in the Washington Post. The book went on to become a best-seller, and Cuomo’s approval ratings in New York remained as consistently high as the state’s fatality rate.

Until late January, that is, when a report from politically ambitious New York attorney general Letitia James found that nursing-home deaths were at least 50 percent higher than Cuomo had admitted. This was too much to ignore. When asked about the AG report, Cuomo engaged in his usual contortions, blaming the Trump administration’s “federal guidance” for his health department’s undercounting of nursing-home deaths. Such deflections worked for a year.

“Who cares — 33 [percent of deaths], 28, died in a hospital, died in a nursing home — they died,” Cuomo said. Was this the “empathy” that Slavitt referred to? Cuomo, of course, wanted to create the impression that the kerfuffle was merely about semantics, since the overall number of deaths remains the same. Indeed, except we don’t know the number of people that Cuomo directly put in danger, which is why the governor manipulated the data in the first place. We care, I suppose, because the public and in particular the thousands of families affected by Cuomo’s decision deserve a proper accounting. We care because the governor likely lied and then took credit for success he had not earned. We care because bad policy should not be repeated. Cuomo created super-spreader centers even though he knew the disease tended to spread like “fire through dry grass” in nursing homes. New York saw over 12 percent of its nursing-home population succumb to COVID.

Perhaps Cuomo could be forgiven for making a tragic early mistake when dealing with a poorly understood pandemic. Experts were flailing for information back in March. But there is no excuse for Cuomo’s subsequent cynical, flagrant lying, or his attempts to blame others.

The cowardly Cuomo showed no compunction about smearing the Orthodox Jewish community as the reason for surges in the virus or about attempting to restrict religious services — a measure later overturned by the Supreme Court — while at the same time celebrating the Black Lives Matter marches that brought millions close together.

Neither was the governor a champion of “science,” even in the Democrats’ conception of the word. “When I say ‘experts’ in air quotes, it sounds like I’m saying I don’t really trust the experts,” Cuomo recently admitted at a news conference. “Because I don’t. Because I don’t.” And they don’t trust him. At least nine of New York’s top public-health experts have either quit or retired over the past few months, including the deputy commissioner for public health, the director of the bureau of communicable disease, and the medical director for epidemiology.

“Incompetent government kills people,” Cuomo noted during one recent diatribe against the Trump administration. “More people died than needed to die in COVID. That’s the truth.” Indeed, and few know it better than Andrew Cuomo.