New York Governor Andrew Cuomo took a disgraceful victory lap over the bodies of 6,200 senior citizens who may have needlessly died in the state’s nursing homes. Now the Democrat responsible for sending patients infected with COVID-19 into those facilities is obstructing an impartial investigation.
“I wouldn’t do an investigation whether or not it’s political, everybody can make that decision for themselves. I think you’d have to be blind to realize it’s not political,” Cuomo reportedly said. “Just look at where it comes from and look at the sources and look at their political affiliations and look at who wrote the letter in Congress and look at what publications raise it and what media outward networks raise it.”
The Democrat-run New York state legislature recently took Health Commissioner Dr. Howard Zucker to task, to some degree, over the extremely high nursing home death rates.
“Death was prevalent and harrowing in New York State’s nursing homes,” state Senate Investigations Committee Chair James Skoufis reportedly asked Zucker. “Governor Cuomo has rightly described the virus ripping through nursing homes as ‘a fire through dry grass,’ It’s now up to the Legislature to determine who lit the match and understand how and why the fire fanned out.”
It appears Cuomo has already begun playing pandemic politics, and thousands of elders are being used for his gain. The governor has orchestrated a lopsided report that concludes upwards of 80 percent of patients in 310 nursing homes were already infected before the fateful order.
Such statistics defy reality at the time because widespread testing was not available. The only way to know whether someone had contracted COVID-19 was to show symptoms and get tested at a medical facility, such as a hospital.
What establishment media outlets have been leaving out of so-called “reporting” is that Cuomo’s mandate did two things that lit the match. First, he ordered coronavirus-infected seniors to be transported from hospitals directly into nursing homes. This inserted the virus into assisted living communities where the virus attacked the most vulnerable. Second, his directive banned facilities from testing arrivals from the hospital to determine whether they were contagious. It wasn’t just a match to dry grass. Cuomo threw gasoline on the fire that slaughtered helpless elderly Americans.
At the time, health experts and nursing home officials pushed back on Cuomo’s orders, saying they were already ill-prepared to keep our valued elders safe. Shortages of personal protective wear such as masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer were harshly impacted elder care facilities.
Now Cuomo’s insiders have crafted a phony report that absolves him of gross malfeasance. The Democrat-written document manipulates data and makes laughable arguments as to why infected patients sent to nursing homes are not the cause of the heightened death rate.
“If admissions were driving fatalities, the order of the peak fatalities and peak admissions would have been reversed,” the report states.
But using April 8 as the peak death toll in New York does not correlate to immediate nursing home fatalities. Everyone knew then, as we do now, that COVID-19 can take nearly a month before symptoms present. In the days and weeks following the report’s false April 8 claim, upwards of 4,000 residents lost their lives.
With widespread testing now in place, 7,900 New York nursing home residents contracted the virus in June alone. All told, 25 percent of all New York deaths stemmed from nursing homes.
“I don’t believe your characterization is correct. I believe it is a political issue. I think it’s the New York Post, I think it’s Michael Goodwin, I think it’s Bob McManus, I think it’s Fox TV. I think it is all politically motivated,” Cuomo said.
If that were true, then why not allow impartial investigators to get to the bottom of these deaths? Don’t families have a right to know? Or is the governor preventing true facts from coming to light because it’s bad for him, politically?
Featured Image by Diana Robinson
