GRANDMA-KILLER CUOMO: On COVID-19, Andrew Cuomo damned himself with his own words.
On March 3, Cuomo held an anti-vaping rally in Albany, complete with a hashtag, #NoVapeNY. Too bad he didn’t think of a hashtag to fight off COVID-19. Instead, Cuomo spent most of March delivering one simple message to the people of New York: Stop worrying so much.
Cuomo would routinely communicate the epidemiological equivalent of “chillax,” spouting various versions of the same line: “The fear, the panic is a bigger problem than the virus.” He told New Yorkers starving for reliable information that the “reality is reassuring,” that “the facts don’t merit the level of anxiety we are seeing.” He flippantly declared, “We have more people in this country dying from the flu” and “this is not the Ebola virus.”
It’s true that COVID-19 isn’t the Ebola virus. In fact, COVID-19 would go on to kill more people in New York in just the first two weeks of April than Ebola has worldwide in all human history.
But, it wasn’t just his downplaying of the virus that caused damage. It was his wild and inconsistent decision-making.
As Cuomo has embarked on his eight-month campaign of self-aggrandizement, he has continually criticized the slow reaction of President Trump. But on March 16, as Trump advocated for a national shutdown, Cuomo resisted. Instead, he limited the allowable size of gatherings to 50: five times Trump’s national guidelines. While making this announcement, he said that the federal government has “been behind from Day 1 on this crisis.”
Cuomo continued to claim there would be no shutdown on March 17 and 18. Even on March 19, he bragged of calming a panicked friend, telling this likely mythical individual that a shutdown “is not going to happen.” It happened the next day.
All of this pales in comparison to Cuomo’s ghoulish health directive of March 25. The order forced nursing homes to import known COVID-positive patients, while prohibiting the facilities from testing new or returning residents for the virus. Peter Ajemian, Cuomo’s communications director, would eventually try to justify the policy, telling Fox News the governor was trying to stop “nursing homes from discriminating against COVID patients.”
Keeping the uninfected away from the infected amid a pandemic isn’t discrimination. It’s common sense. Unless you’re Cuomo. . . .
A sober examination of Cuomo’s record reveals that he oversaw the single worst coronavirus response in the world. New York’s death count is higher than the bottom 29 US states combined. The fatality rate in New York is 67 percent above that of Peru, the highest of any nation on earth.
Flashback: Why oh why is NY Governor Andrew Cuomo being praised for his coronavirus response? Governor Andrew Cuomo does not deserve kudos for his COVID-19 policies. He put the elderly at great risk. And by “great risk,” I mean he killed thousands.
Related: Justice Department Ramps Up Inquiry into NY Care Home Deaths.
The demand ratchets up pressure on Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo after months of bipartisan criticism that the state’s official tally of 6,722 dead at long-term care facilities is probably off by thousands. That’s because New York, unlike nearly every other state, counts only residents who died on a nursing home’s property and not those who died after being taken to a hospital. Cuomo’s administration has repeatedly refused to release such nursing home data to lawmakers and the media, including a public-records request from The Associated Press dating back to May. . . .
An AP analysis in August found New York is probably undercounting nursing home deaths by thousands, noting that a separate federal count since May that included resident deaths in hospitals was 65 percent higher than the comparable state count.
Cuomo, who has generally been praised for flattening the curve in a state hit with a nation-topping 33,400 deaths, has nonetheless faced unrelenting criticism over his handling of nursing homes, particularly a controversial March 25 order that sent thousands of recovering COVID-19 patients from hospitals into nursing homes at the height of the pandemic.
New York’s method of counting allows Cuomo to boast that his state has a lower percentage of nursing home deaths compared to other states.
It’s a lie, and he’s a grandma-killer.