Cuomo denies alleged cover-up in crisis surrounding nursing home deaths

After insisting his administration had done nothing wrong last week, Governor Andrew Cuomo, on Monday, did not directly apologize for a lack of transparency surrounding the record-keeping of COVID deaths in nursing homes during the pandemic. Instead, he admitted that his administration made a “mistake” by not being transparent about the deaths, which created a “void” that was “filled with skepticism, and cynicism, and conspiracy theories which furthered the confusion.”

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As New York executes a major expansion of the vaccine rollout this week, Governor Cuomo is facing a major political crisis amid allegations that he and his administration withheld from state lawmakers thousands of nursing-home COVID-19 deaths last year over concerns that the data would be used against them by the Trump administration. In response to the possible cover-up, more than a dozen Democrats in Albany have joined Republicans in suggesting Cuomo be stripped of the emergency powers he has used to combat the pandemic over the last 11 months.

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Health commissioner Howard Zucker has insisted that the state has never underreported coronavirus fatalities and has always been transparent about how it counted them based on where the patients died. Governor Cuomo infamously brushed off the nursing-home data disparity after the attorney general’s report came out, remarking during a January 29 press conference, “Who cares [if they] died in the hospital, died in a nursing home? They died.”

Read More: New York Magazine, 16 February 2021 and  New York Magazine, 29 January 2021