News reports accuse Cuomo administration officials of altering report to conceal COVID-19 nursing home deaths
(The Center Square) – A pair of news reports claim officials in the Cuomo administration knew the scope of the COVID-19 death toll tied to nursing homes last summer and revised a report to keep that information from becoming public.
The New York Times said state health officials were confident in the higher numbers by June, but a report written by a Department of Health official was “substantially rewritten” by adviser Jim Malatras, who was serving on Cuomo’s pandemic task force. That interaction between heath officials and the administration caused friction. The Wall Street Journal also reported on the alteration. The two newspapers put the total nursing home death toll between 9,000 and 10,000.
Still, the initially revised report by Malatras didn’t revise the death toll. That didn’t happen, according to the report, until Secretary of the Governor Melissa DeRosa and Linda Lacewell, superintendent of the state’s Department of Financial Services, became involved.
The administration published the report in early July. It came at a time when criticism was mounting regarding a March 25, 2020, order to nursing homes to admit COVID-19-positive patients. It came shortly after Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives blamed Cuomo and Democratic governors in other states of mishandling nursing homes and exposing residents to the virus.
The administration’s report listed more than 6,000 deaths that occurred at nursing homes and cited community spread as the main cause for those deaths. However, nursing home residents who caught the virus, were admitted to a hospital and died there were counted as hospital deaths, just like someone who lived in a private residence.
The actual nursing death total would not become known to the public until February 2021, after both a scathing report by Attorney General Letitia James and a court order to release the data in response to legal action from the Empire Center. Since then, there have been increased calls for investigations, with federal authorities looking into the matter.
James’ report, which looked at a sample of data, indicated that while the total number of deaths was accurate, the number of deaths attributable to nursing homes was underreported by about 50 percent.
In a statement issued late Thursday, DOH spokesperson Gary Holmes said the task force was not “satisfied” that the death data had been verified, so a decision was made to report deaths by where they occurred.
“The report’s purpose was to ensure the public had a clear non-political evaluation for how COVID entered nursing homes at the height of the pandemic,” he said. “All data sets reviewed came to a common conclusion – that spread from staff was likely the primary driver that introduced COVID into these nursing homes.”
Thursday’s reports are another blow for a governor who has taken several in the news media in the past month. After the attorney general’s report, the New York Post reported that DeRosa confided to Democratic lawmakers that they held off on answering state lawmakers questions regarding the nursing home issue out of fear that the information would be used in a federal investigation.
As the nursing home scandal has grown, so too have sexual harassment claims against Cuomo. That’s the subject of a separate investigation by James’ office.
Republicans used the articles as another chance to repeat the message they’ve been hammering for weeks – that Cuomo and his administration have lied about the nursing home scandal. State GOP Chairman Nick Langworthy on Twitter said it’s time to begin impeachment proceedings.
Others continued their calls for Cuomo to resign.
“If another intentionally altered report comes forward it may be time for the Governor to step aside,” Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt tweeted in response to the Journal article.
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