RUTHFULLY YOURS

T wo weeks ago, a Democratic attorney general of New York who had enjoyed Andrew Cuomo’s backing released a tentative preliminary report that gingerly suggested the actual death toll from COVID-19 in the state’s nursing homes was “approximately 50 percent” higher than Cuomo’s numbers had all led us to believe.

Experienced Cuomo watchers scoffed: Despite being labeled a “bombshell” in the media, the AG report was obviously soft-pedaling the reality. Attorney General Letitia James is well aware of the potential hazards of incurring Cuomo’s wrath and seemed to be at pains to make the report as bland as possible. It sampled only 10 percent of state nursing homes.

The actual numbers keep rising, and now the estimated death toll from COVID in nursing homes is 62 percent higher than Cuomo was claiming just last month. Cuomo’s disastrous March 25, 2020, order that nursing homes must accept COVID-infected individuals, which was not rescinded until May 10, may have been the single worst policy blunder made by any American official during the pandemic.Making matters worse, Cuomo has worked furiously to cover up the facts for nearly a year. His own aide, Melissa DeRosa, acknowledged as much in a call to state Democratic lawmakers in which she blatantly admitted hiding the truth for fear of political repercussions. “We froze” out of fear that the truth would “be used against us” by federal prosecutors, DeRosa said in the call, whose details were reported by the New York Post, one of the few news outlets that has declined to put on a cheerleader skirt and shake its pom-poms at every Cuomo press conference.

Back in August, state lawmakers tried to extract more information from Cuomo about the true death toll in nursing homes, but Cuomo stonewalled his own legislature because Donald Trump exists, DeRosa explained. As with so many other matters, urging Democrats to frame everything as a question of how much they hate Trump was a method for avoiding inconvenient truths about Democratic actions: “Right around the same time, [then-President Trump] turns this into a giant political football,” DeRosa is heard complaining on the recording of the discussion. DeRosa pleaded with her own party’s legislators to consider the potential damage to the party had the truth become known. Trump “starts tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes,” DeRosa said. “He starts going after [Democratic New Jersey governor Phil] Murphy, starts going after [Democratic California governor Gavin] Newsom, starts going after [Democratic Michigan governor] Gretchen Whitmer.” And he even “directs the Department of Justice to do an investigation into us,” DeRosa added. “And basically, we froze.”

Far from it. Cuomo was preening, not freezing: Appearing on television virtually every day, writing a book boasting about his leadership, telling an adoring news media that New York had led the way on coronavirus strategy.

On July 24, a New York Post reporter asked Cuomo whether he would support a nonpartisan investigation of state nursing-home deaths. The answer was no (how dare you even ask, silly reporter). Instead of saying this, Cuomo issued this classic non-answer, an incantation of hated names in lieu of transparency:

I don’t believe your categorization is correct. I believe it is a political issue. I think it is the New York Post. I think it’s [Post columnist] Michael Goodwin, I think it’s [Post columnist] Bob McManus. I think it’s Fox TV. I think it is all politically motivated. If anybody looked at the facts, they would know it is wholly absurd on its face. . . . First, go talk to the Republican states now — Florida, Texas, Arizona — ask them what is happening in nursing homes. It’s all politics.

To recap, as of last month Cuomo acknowledged only that 8,711 nursing-home residents died of COVID. After James’s report, which confirmed suspicions that Cuomo wasn’t counting the many nursing-home residents who were taken to hospitals and then died there, the official tally rose to 12,743. This week, that number jumped to 14,100, according to figures uncovered by Freedom of Information Law requests by the Empire Center for Public Policy that include confirmed and presumed COVID fatalities for nursing-home clients, whether those deaths took place within those homes or off-site. That’s 5,389 deaths linked to nursing homes that Cuomo hid — double New York’s death toll from 9/11.

New York and its close cousin New Jersey still have the two worst COVID death tolls among U.S. states, and both have far higher death tolls than any country on earth. (Belgium has suffered more than any other country, with 1,876 COVID deaths per million; in New York and New Jersey those figures are 2,330 and 2,510, according to Statista.) All of them happened after Cuomo shrugged off the COVID threat (“The facts defeat fear. Because the reality is reassuring,” he said on March 2, adding, “Excuse our arrogance as New Yorkers” but “this is not our first rodeo” so “we should relax”). The virus, we later learned, was then rampaging through the state. Yet on March 6 Cuomo added, “the overall risk level . . . remains low.”

Cuomo, the media’s favorite cynosure, the man who inspired a drooling Trevor Noah to proclaim himself a “Cuomo-sexual,” was treated to a series of why-are-you-so-awesome CNN interviews with his brother Chris and won an Emmy for his act, no longer looks quite so much like St. Andrew of the Hudson. The state GOP chair is calling for his impeachment, 40 percent of New Yorkers said in a poll this week they’d like to recall him (they can’t; no such provision exists in state law), and even some of his media enablers are beginning to change their tone. Meanwhile, Cuomo continues to discover new ways to blunder, erecting unnecessary regulatory barriers to vaccine distribution. How many lives has Andrew Cuomo cost us? How many will die unnecessarily as he micromanages the vaccine rollout? Now that political reporters can no longer spend twelve hours a day discussing Trump’s latest Twitter gibe, perhaps they will take more interest in such questions.