Cuomo, Covid, and the Nursing Homes: Part 2, What Was Cuomo's Own Involvement in the Cover-Up?

What Cuomo and crew knew before they issued a report trying to avoid talking about impact of March 25 directive

19 Sept 2024, NY Post: Cuomo personally altered report that lowballed COVID nursing-home deaths, emails show – contradicting his claim to Congress

Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo personally altered a state review that lowballed the nursing home COVID-19 death count, emails detailed in a new report show – a revelation that directly contradicts his claims he had nothing to do with it.

Emails and congressional documents undercut Cuomo’s defiant assertion during a summer congressional grilling that he never saw or even had any memory of the state Health Department report, the New York Times first reported.

“Governor’s edits are attached for your review,” Cuomo’s assistant wrote to the then-governor’s senior staff in June 2020, the Times report states.

Andrew Cuomo at Sept 10, 2024 Congressional hearing

Yes, it first shows up in the NY Times, with a little less sensational headline:

NYT, 19 Sept 2024: Emails Suggest Cuomo Undersold His Role in Altering Covid Report

Andrew Cuomo said he could not recall seeing or revising a New York State Health Department report on how the state handled the early stages of the pandemic.

Earlier this summer, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo squared off for a closed-door interview with seven members of a Republican-led congressional subcommittee investigating how New York handled the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.

Mr. Cuomo was asked repeatedly about a State Health Department report that deflected blame for the thousands of people who died of Covid at nursing homes in early 2020. Mr. Cuomo stood by the report and said he certainly did not review it and insisted he had no memory of seeing it before its release.

But a review of emails and congressional documents appears to show how Mr. Cuomo not only saw the report, but personally wrote parts of early drafts.

"Governor's edits are attached for your review," Mr. Cuomo's assistant Farah Kennedy wrote in an email sent to several members of the ex-governor's senior staff on June 23, 2020. "The smaller text in the beginning is from your original document. He replaced your paragraph on page 3 beginning with 'But, like in all fifty states, there were Covid-positive cases."'

Mr. Cuomo apparently inserted language to underscore how "community spread among employees or possibly visitation by family and friends were relevant factors" that contributed to nursing home deaths.

"The larger text," Ms. Kennedy noted, "is what he added."

The email exchange among Mr. Cuomo's aides, which was reviewed by The New York Times, was one of many sought by the Justice Department and a law firm retained by the State Assembly as it prepared to impeach Mr. Cuomo in 2021.

So here is the deal, jumping back to the NY Post piece — Cuomo tried to avoid culpability by having his close aides send all the emails. He would mark up (in pencil/pen, on print-outs, I suppose… then have the aides send electronic versions, I guess) and have their fingerprints on the emails:

And none of the emails detailed in the Times report were actually written by Cuomo, who reputedly doesn’t use email.

Cuomo’s repeated attempts to deflect blame during a Sept. 10 Capitol Hill hearing led Hudson Valley Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) to deem him a “lying sack of s—t.”

[Lawler is my representative!]

Trying to shift the blame on a bad policy

Remember what all of this activity was in service of: making excuses for a policy he was forced to back out of.

Let us go back to my prior post:

Here is the timeline again:

• March 25, 2020: Executive directive issued requiring nursing homes to receive COVID patients discharged from hospitals

• May 10, 2020: Executive directive rescinded

• July 6, 2020: NY State Dept. of Health released report on nursing home COVID deaths - includes edits from Cuomo & his staff

• February 2021: Revised report issued (reverses some of the distortions from prior, plus updated data)

• August 10, 2021: Andrew Cuomo announced resignation from governorship (effective August 24)

This part of the story is about that July 6, 2020 report, put together after the original nursing home policy was a failure.

So Cuomo wanted a report saying nuh-uh, it wasn’t a total disaster, it was actually staff and family members visiting nursing home residents, not sick residents coming back to the homes, that spread disease the most!

Non-Sequiturs in July 6, 2020 Report

The press release that went along with the July 6, 2020 report: New York State Department of Health Issues Report On COVID-19 In Nursing Homes

Sub heds:

Data Indicates COVID-19 Was Introduced Into Nursing Homes by Infected Staff

Report Documents That Peak Staff Infections Correlates With Peak Nursing Home Resident Deaths

Employee Infections Align With Rates in Highly Impacted Regions of State

I will get to the February 2021 updated report (where they were forced to undo the data fiddling done with the July 2020 report), but do you see the non-sequitur re: the March 25 directive?

The primary method of infection could be via staff. Because most of the infections occurred before March 25.

That doesn’t mean the March 25 directive had zero impact. There could have been additional infections and deaths due to the re-introduction of sick residents.

None of that is addressed above. None of that speaks to what the marginal effect of the March 25 directive was. Indeed, the NYDOH folks noted that the primary spring wave in NY was over by the time the directive went into effect… so duh. They already had been affected.

Empire Center: Cuomo Administration Knew About the Effect of the Order

9 Sept 2024: Internal Cuomo Administration Documents Showed Evidence of Harm from Nursing Home Order

State Health Department documents from June 2020, newly unearthed by congressional investigators, appear to show harmful effects from a controversial order requiring nursing homes to admit Covid-positive patients.

The documents would seem to undermine if not contradict the Cuomo administration’s long-standing claim that the March 25, 2020 order had no significant impact on the health of nursing homes residents during the pandemic’s first wave.

They also indicate that state officials were aware of unflattering evidence about the policy but withheld it from the public through years of controversy.

Issued when Covid cases were rising rapidly in New York City, the March 25 order from the Health Department said nursing homes “must comply with expedited receipt” of patients being discharged from hospitals, and barred homes from turning away admissions who were Covid-positive. More than 9,000 transfers occurred under the policy, which was in effect until May 10, 2020.

Charts emailed on June 7, 2020, to then-Health Commissioner Howard Zucker indicated that homes which admitted infected patients under the order suffered higher Covid death rates than facilities with no such admissions.

Here are the graphs — these are scanned versions, so I will re-type the content:

The title is: Statewide: Breakdown of NH [Nursing Home] deaths by admissions/readmissions

There is an important note: Controlled: Includes only deaths after April 16th and removed facilities with no COVID positive case

Of all the facilities, 45 facilities had no admissions or readmissions of COVID positive cases, with an overall COVID mortality rate of 4.1% (confirmed or presumed COVID deaths out of in-house population) for that period April 17-June 6.

Compare that against the 330 facilities with any COVID-positive admissions or re-admissions, who had a 8.1% COVID mortality rate for the same period.

This is all going to be a little rough — data quality could be iffy then. And you see a break-out by admission/re-admission rate.

Here is a similar graph for New York City-only facilities, same period:

This is a subset of the other graph.

I will talk about excess mortality due to the March 25 directive, based on the Empire Center’s and other people’s analyses, in a subsequent post.

The point is that the above information was in front of Cuomo and crew as they were putting together their ass-covering report for July.

They knew that the March 25 directive potentially made a difference in COVID mortality in the nursing homes. Maybe fewer deaths in nursing homes came from the directive than came from the first COVID wave… from before the March 25 directive…. but that directive was a choice.

Choices were made

What I wrote in the last post:

This is the part that really pissed me off. I can give a partial pass to the initial bad decision-making — loads of people worldwide made bad decisions in the initial rounds of COVID in 2020! — it’s the lying and dodging responsibility that angered people. At least for others, they learned to keep mum. Some, if they weren’t about to do mea culpas, learned not to dig their holes deeper.

The whole thing was a snow job.

June 7, 2020 was when they were starting to put together a report on nursing home deaths due to COVID.

It could have been fine if they had noted that the initial infections (in that first wave in NY, especially centered around NYC) had entered nursing homes via staff and family members (being the most mobile folks, of course).

And then noted that the March 25 directive didn’t help matters, so yay that they course-corrected and we have a better policy now.

But no, Cuomo couldn’t admit to any fault. Even though nobody knew what they were doing, and were just making stuff up.

There were all sorts of choices that could have been made.

Avoiding causal language would have been the most cautious approach, but nobody felt like being cautious. Two weeks to stop the spread!

Mmmm.

What’s the point?

Cuomo is out of office, and he is unlikely to face federal charges for anything. Democrats have enough trouble.

However, there are a few potential points to be made.

From my point of view, though it was sex-related accusations that got Cuomo pried out of office, if enough of his own sliminess surrounding COVID and nursing homes get stuck on him, I hope he doesn’t get to wriggle his way back into office (especially another Democratic presidential administration.) Getting slapped for sexual harassment barely gets a man barred permanently, if he’s a useful Democrat.

Cuomo is not showing up to these hearings because he’s concerned about legal liability, I’m thinking. It’s that he wants to remain politically viable. He sees the current Democratic “talent” on offer, and thinks maybe he still has a chance … somewhere. I’d rather he be shut out.

But more that that, perhaps Cuomo can be an object lesson to other politicians, not to mess about with reports like this. It’s one thing to try to spin a bad policy into a good light, and it’s another to completely torture the statistics (I haven’t gotten to that bit yet), in addition to angering people with irrelevant arguments.

Or, maybe, politicians can learn to make better policy decisions in the first place.

But I’m trying to aim lower. Just not defrauding with stats.

We can work up to better policy later.