CV NEWS FEED // Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, on Tuesday faced a closed-door hearing before the House select subcommittee assigned to investigate government actions taken in response to the outbreak of COVID-19.
In March 2020, Cuomo issued an executive order requiring nursing homes in the Empire State to admit COVID-19 patients – despite the compromised health of residents. In a development widely attributed to the governor’s order, nursing homes immediately saw a wave of COVID-19 deaths among the elderly and infirm.
A February 2021 report by the Empire Center noted that nursing home COVID-19 deaths in New York then stood at over 13,000. The “admission of coronavirus-positive patients into New York nursing homes under March 25 guidance from the New York State Department of Health was associated with a statistically significant increase in resident deaths,” the report found.
“The effect was more pronounced upstate,” where “each positive admission was associated with 0.62 additional deaths (MOE plus or minus 0.17), and any number of positive admissions was associated with 9.33 additional deaths per facility (MOE plus or minus 2.6),” the report explained:
Also in the upstate region, facilities that admitted at least one positive patient during this period accounted for 82 percent of coronavirus deaths among nursing home residents, even though they had only 32 percent of the residents.
Fox News reported Tuesday:
Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic as governor has been a significant focus of the panel’s – in particular, a March 25, 2020, executive order by the then-governor that restricted nursing homes from refusing to admit or readmit residents “solely based on confirmed or suspect[ed] diagnosis of COVID-19.”
House COVID subcommittee Chair Brad Wenstrup, R-OH, told Fox ahead of the hearing with Cuomo Tuesday: “We want to uncover the circumstances that led to this. There has to be some kind of process where this was written up and he signed it. And we want to make sure that something like this is never repeated.”
While COVID-19 deaths and hospitalizations still raged in New York, Cuomo drew a firestorm of criticism for holding press conferences and taking interviews about his administration’s response to the virus – which he boasted of as among the best in the country. In August 2020, the governor announced he was writing a book about his accomplishments during the pandemic.
Fox’s Tuesday report added:
Wenstrup said committee investigators have “several hours of questions” lined up for the former governor, such as “Why was he spending so much time writing a book while we had a pandemic going on, while we have this nursing home problem?” and “Why did it take him so long to rescind [the executive order] when it became very obvious that this was a bad plan?”