Empire State Today

Republican lawmakers are calling foul on New York State Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo for not being transparent about the data on senior citizens who died due to COVID-19. Reports have revealed that Cuomo undercounted the number of nursing home residents who were infected by the coronavirus and died in hospitals.

The connection came from an earlier directive wherein state health officials told nursing homes in New York to accommodate residents recovering from the virus after they were discharged from hospitals. This could have led to the increase in the number of deaths among senior citizens seeing that they are more vulnerable to the virus due to their advanced age.

Cuomo denied the connection and said that the senior citizens who died from COVID-19 were infected by the nursing homes’ staff members and not the recovering patients. But Cuomo still received lots of backlash for doctoring the numbers of fatalities related to COVID-19.

Cuomo admitted he made a mistake and that part of the error was caused by his administration’s reluctance to give former president Donald Trump an ace up his sleeve to use against New York. Melissa DeRosa, Cuomo’s top aide, admitted that they deflated the numbers because they were worried that Trump might use it against them.

GOP lawmakers sent Rep. Dick Durbin a letter asking him to convene a public hearing on Cuomo’s  actions. In the letter the lawmakers wrote, “We now know the Cuomo administration actively concealed the level of admissions and intentionally underreported these admissions in a way that callously and recklessly put facility residents in danger and resulted in an unknown number of deaths,”