Cuomo: Nursing Home Order ‘Wasn’t a Mistake’ – Staffers Brought Infection into Nursing Homes

On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) defended his order that sent coronavirus patients into nursing homes and blamed the infections in nursing homes on staffers bringing in the virus.

Co-host Willie Geist asked, “Looking back now, with the information you have, was it a mistake to issue that March 25 order to send people back into the nursing homes, now that you have all the information you have?”

Cuomo responded, “First, it was a — it was federal guidance that was put out, Willie. … No, it wasn’t a mistake. Because if you look at the facts, not that anybody looks at facts anymore, by the time — you didn’t want to leave a senior citizen in a hospital for two weeks if they didn’t need to be in a hospital bed for two weeks. You didn’t want to use the hospital bed that way. And it’s very dangerous for the senior citizen to be in a hospital for two weeks, sepsis, secondary infections, etc. By the time a person was transferred, after nine or ten days, they were no longer contagious. And what all the data says is, the reason you had infections in the nursing homes [was] because the staff brought in the infection. And you look at the communities that had the high[est] infection rate overall, those are the communities that had nursing homes with a high infection rate. So, it is that the staff got infected, they came to work, and they brought in the infection.”

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