Andrew Cuomo Does Not Reveal Number of Nursing Home Dead in Coronavirus ‘Leadership’ Memoir

The Associated Press
The Associated Press

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s new memoir touting his own “leadership” during the coronavirus pandemic does not mention the number of nursing home residents who died.

Cuomo’s new book, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic, has generated intense public criticism, especially as the pandemic is still ongoing. Earlier this month, grieving families held a mock “funeral” for the book, filled with 6,500 book covers.

While Cuomo has enjoyed positive media coverage, there is growing outrage about New York’s directive in March to force nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients, which was only nearly two months later.

Critics say that the policy helped spread coronavirus among the most vulnerable population.

ProPublica notes that Cuomo does not come clean about the policy in his new book:

Here’s one hard truth Cuomo has still yet to tell: how many New York nursing home residents have died of COVID-19.

Nine months into the pandemic, and three months after his health commissioner testified that he was hard at work counting nursing home deaths, Cuomo has not announced the grim total.

“The governor has time, in the middle of a pandemic, to write a book on the COVID-19 crisis, but after months of delay he has not delivered on his word to provide the legislature with the accurate numbers of nursing home deaths,” said Ron Kim, a Democratic state legislator from Queens. “As a result, we are squandering away an opportunity to demonstrate how his government can be there to respond to this crisis.”

[U]nder a policy he enacted in late March, more than 6,400 patients sick with COVID-19 were sent from hospitals to nursing homes without being tested to see if they were still contagious.

In April, Cuomo attempted to blame greed for “money” for the nursing home crisis, saying that nursing homes did not want to lose potential patients, whether or not they had COVID-19.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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