Cuomo Responds to Scandal at Lengthy Presser, Claims Staff and Visitors Brought Covid Into Nursing Homes
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has come under intense scrutiny in the past few weeks over serious questions about nursing home deaths, between a report from the New York AG’s office saying deaths were seriously undercounted and more recent claims from a Cuomo aide about withholding data on the death toll.
During his press conference Monday, the governor said he was going to “clarify facts” on the matter.
“This past year, there is a toxic political environment, and everything gets politicized. And there’s political spin and there are facts, two very different things,” he said, claiming nursing home death toll numbers were “always fully, publicly, and accurately reported.”
Cuomo addressed a New York Department of Health memo from last March on nursing homes at the center of the scandal, claiming staffers brought covid into nursing homes:
“Covid did not get into the nursing homes by people coming from hospitals. The covid got into the nursing homes by staff walking into the nursing home when we didn’t even know we had covid. Staff walking into a nursing home even though they were asymptomatic because the national experts all told us you could only spread covid if you had symptoms and they were wrong. Covid may have been brought into a nursing home because visitors brought it in and didn’t know they were contagious, because the guidance was ‘you can only be contagious if you have symptoms’… That turned out to be wrong.”
At one point Cuomo tried to address the concerns and questions from the public and the press, saying, “I understand they were not answered quickly enough.”
“I understand that there was a lot going on. Everybody was working 24 hours a day. Everybody was overwhelmed. We were in the midst of dealing with a pandemic and trying to save lives. They were answering DOJ and nursing homes in the hospitals were also in the middle of hell and in the middle of a pandemic and they were scrambling and they were managing a crisis,” the governor said.
He went on to repeatedly say the “void” they created was filled with “skepticism, cynicism, and conspiracy theories.”
“All the deaths in the nursing homes and in the hospitals were always fully publicly and accurately reported,” Cuomo claimed.
After Cuomo’s comments, Fox News’ Janice Dean — who has been a major critic of the governor’s after the deaths of her husband’s parents last year — and CNN’s Brianna Keilar called him out:
The only “distortion” about this is coming out of @NYGovCuomo’s mouth.
— Janice Dean (@JaniceDean) February 15, 2021
Exactly this.
Per report by Dem NY AG, the prelim data for a sample of 62 nursing homes “suggests that COVID-19 resident deaths associated with nursing homes in NY state appear to be undercounted by Department of Health by approximately 50 percent.” https://t.co/ARYugqLSvL
— Brianna Keilar (@brikeilarcnn) February 15, 2021
You can watch above, via CNN.
