Cuomo admin tracked nursing home deaths months before incomplete DOH report https://nypost.com/2021/04/07/cuomo-admin-tracked-nursing-home-deaths-months-before-doh-report/ The Cuomo administration began tracking COVID-19 related out-of-facility nursing home resident deaths as early as last April — yet still withheld the data from a state Health Department report released nearly three months later, according to a document obtained by The Post. The state DOH memo sent out to the administrators of nursing homes and adult care facilities directed them to report daily the number of residents who died of COVID-19, including “if the death occurred in” their “facility or the hospital setting.” A copy of the directive obtained by The Post is dated April 18, 2020 — about eleven weeks before a health department report that excluded the number of nursing home residents who died of coronavirus outside of their facilities. Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s top aides pushed the DOH to omit the out-of-facility nursing resident deaths. The final report, consequently, only included in-facility deaths, painting an incomplete picture of the pandemic’s effect on the state’s most vulnerable population. State Department of Health spokesman Gary Holmes told The Post in a Wednesday statement that the agency “has received HERDS information daily from more than 1,000 long term care facilities and more than 200 hospitals since the start of this pandemic.” “In April 2020 we asked for additional information to provide a more specific clinical picture, and as part of that correspondence we asked all facilities to provide that same level of information retrospectively to March 1,” the spokesman said. Only after the Journal report did Cuomo’s team admit to withholding data in the public report. “The out-of-facility data was omitted after DOH could not confirm it had been adequately verified,” Beth Garvey, special counsel to Cuomo, had said in a statement. In Wednesday’s statement, Holmes said the DOH “spent months reconciling the information received [from hospitals] – de-duplicating, correcting data entry errors, etc. – in order to understand and report accurate fatality data from multiple sources.” At the end of January, the state finally released an accounting of the number of nursing home resident deaths in both nursing homes and hospitals. But, the revised figures came after months of stonewalling lawmakers and reporters, a lawsuit from the Empire Center and a damning state attorney general report.
Report: Apparent Prank at Albany's Corning Tower Leads to Change https://wgy.iheart.com/content/2021...ank-at-albanys-corning-tower-leads-to-change/ State workers say an apparent prank at the Corning Tower in Albany last week has already led to at least one change. Employees tell The Times Union that after a light display that usually shows the phrase "NY Tough" on it ended up saying "NY Touch" Friday, zip ties have been put in place to secure window blinds in the building to prevent it from happening again. A spokesperson for the Office of General Services hasn't commented on the incident, which comes as Governor Cuomo is facing claims of sexual harassment. He has denied all allegations made against him and is refusing to resign. READ THE ARTICLE HERE
Cuomo still working to run out the clock on his various "problems." Seems to be working per the Gov. Northam strategy. Nevertheless, the dirt keeps coming in. Andrew Cuomo Impeachment Hotline Gets Over 100 Messages Investigators sort through calls and emails as the governor faces allegations of harassment https://www.wsj.com/articles/andrew-cuomo-impeachment-hotline-gets-over-100-messages-11618438631
The lack of Cuomo news bodes well for Cuomo. Northam principle at work. People do believe he is assaulter but that does not necessarily translate into any action as is true of many politicians. And the covid piece may or may not be on people's mind. Politicians always play off of the fact that most people have the attention span of a hummingbird. Most who view this will think to themselves: Okay we have several big rounds of Cuomo beating and discussions, but that has passed and I don't really care anymore. Which makes the point. More New Yorkers believe Gov. Cuomo committed sexual harassment: poll https://nypost.com/2021/04/19/more-new-yorkers-believe-cuomo-committed-sexual-harassment-poll/
Yep, he is clear of any threat to his position. Sexual assault and workplace sexual harassment are permissible if you are a Democrat. As I said, Al Franken should have held on a little more fiercely.
New York Comptroller Refers Criminal Investigation Into Cuomo’s Book to State Attorney General https://www.mediaite.com/news/just-...n-into-cuomos-book-to-state-attorney-general/
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office repeatedly overruled health officials to keep the nursing home death toll a secret, an effort that spanned months. Cuomo Aides Spent Months Hiding Nursing Home Death Toll Aides to the New York governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, repeatedly prevented state health officials from releasing the number of nursing home deaths in the pandemic. Wednesday, April 28, 2021 3:05 PM EST https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/nyregion/cuomo-aides-nursing-home-deaths.html Mr. Cuomo’s most senior aides engaged in a sustained effort to prevent New York's own health officials, including the commissioner, from releasing the true death toll to the public or sharing it with state lawmakers, interviews and documents showed. The actions coincided with the period in which Mr. Cuomo was pitching and then writing a book on the pandemic. The effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office to obscure the pandemic death toll in New York nursing homes was far greater than previously known, with aides repeatedly overruling state health officials over a span of at least five months, according to interviews and newly unearthed documents. Mr. Cuomo’s most senior aides engaged in a sustained effort to prevent the state’s own health officials, including the commissioner, Howard Zucker, from releasing the true death toll to the public or sharing it with state lawmakers, these interviews and documents showed. A scientific paper, which incorporated the data, was never published. An audit of the numbers by a top Cuomo aide was finished months before it became publicly known. Two letters, drafted by the Health Department and meant for state legislators, were never sent. The actions coincided with the period in which Mr. Cuomo was pitching and then writing a book on the pandemic, with the assistance of his top aide, Melissa DeRosa, and others. And they came as the governor’s approach to nursing homes was receiving intensifying scrutiny from critics and Republicans, including former President Donald J. Trump, whose administration made a public show of requesting nursing home death data from four states with Democratic governors, including New York. The number of nursing home residents who died in the pandemic has been a particularly sensitive question for the Cuomo administration. As the first wave hit New York in March 2020, the administration put in place a policy to prevent nursing homes from turning away patients discharged from hospitals after treatment for Covid-19. Some critics blamed the approach for the large number of resident deaths in the spring, a toll that the administration then put at around 6,000. But by the time the policy was rescinded less than two months later, it had become clear that not all the deaths were being included in that tally: Those who died after being transferred to hospitals were not counted as nursing home deaths. Lawmakers and others began asking for a complete count of all resident deaths, but the governor’s aides said parsing the numbers was difficult because of a fear of double counting, among other possible errors. The full data on nursing home deaths was not released until this year, after a report by the state attorney general in late January found that the official tally might have undercounted the true toll by as much as 50 percent. That was something Mr. Cuomo’s aides had known since the previous spring, The New York Times found. Elkan Abramowitz, a lawyer representing Mr. Cuomo’s office, said the administration was reluctant to release numbers it did not believe were reliable. “The whole brouhaha here is overblown to the point where there are cynical suggestions offered for the plain and simple truth that the chamber wanted only to release accurate information that they believed was totally unassailable,” Mr. Abramowitz said. “The chamber was never satisfied that the numbers that they were getting from D.O.H. were accurate,” he said, adding that the actions by Mr. Cuomo’s aides had nothing to do with the governor’s book. The Cuomo administration’s handling of nursing home death data now is the subject of a federal investigation, one of at least four overlapping inquiries into the governor and his administration. As of this month, more than 15,500 nursing home residents with Covid-19 have died. The state attorney general, Letitia James, is also looking into sexual misconduct accusations against the governor, and into whether Mr. Cuomo misused state resources to write his book on the pandemic. The State Assembly is conducting an impeachment inquiry. The governor has denied wrongdoing and urged patience as the inquiries proceed, even as prominent New York Democrats, such as Senator Chuck Schumer, have called for his resignation. Mr. Cuomo has held on to support among many Democratic voters in recent polls, but on nursing homes, he has received sharply negative marks. After the first wave of coronavirus infections and Covid-19 deaths peaked in April 2020, health officials began trying to figure out how many nursing home residents had died, according to three people with knowledge of the process who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss its details. The officials surveyed nursing homes late last April — a process overseen by Mr. Cuomo’s aides — and gathered data on residents who died in the facilities, as well as those who had died after being transferred to hospitals, the people said. Amid criticism about Mr. Cuomo’s policies, the Health Department began preparing a report on the issue in the spring of 2020, under the close watch of the governor’s top advisers. “We are getting anxious over here on this report,” wrote Ms. DeRosa in an email to health officials and top Cuomo aides on June 18, which was reviewed by The Times. She laid out what the strongest points that should be made in the report were “from my perspective”; each had to do with knocking down the idea that readmitting infected people to nursing homes was problematic. “Needs to be able to stand up to scrutiny and definitively tell the story,” Ms. DeRosa added. The final version of the report, which The Times has reported was rewritten several times by senior advisers to Mr. Cuomo and published in early July, emphasized that admissions from hospitals “were not a driver of nursing home infections or fatalities.” Instead, the report contained the lower death count and cited staff as the most likely source of infections. But another version of the study, aimed at the scientific press and drafted at the same time by nearly a dozen health officials, took a more nuanced view. That draft, reviewed by The Times, reached the same conclusions but included a lengthy paragraph describing the limitations of the analysis, such as a lack of information about staff-resident interactions. It put the number of residents with Covid-19 killed in the pandemic at 9,739 through the end of May, far higher than what the administration was saying publicly at the time. “Approximately 35 percent” of all deaths at that point “were nursing home residents,” the draft concluded. But that version was never published. And the publicly released report instead claimed 21 percent of all deaths in New York were in nursing homes. That percentage was better than in all but four states — because most if not all other states included nursing home residents who died in hospitals in their tally — and it became a talking point for the governor. Even as internally, health officials had increasing confidence in the statistics on nursing home deaths, by May, it was clear to lawmakers and others that the Cuomo administration was not including residents who had died in hospitals in its tally of nursing home deaths. State officials said they could not release the figures because of the possibility of “double counting” or other issues in the data. It was the primary reason given by Dr. Zucker, the health commissioner, during a pair of hearings on nursing homes at the State Legislature in August. “When the data comes in,” he testified, “then I will be happy to provide that data to you.” But after that first hearing, an audit was ordered by Ms. DeRosa, who appeared not to trust the Health Department’s statistics, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions, who requested anonymity to discuss closed-door decisions. She sent Gareth Rhodes, a top coronavirus adviser to Mr. Cuomo, to the Health Department in mid-August, according to the people, and he sat with senior health officials to go over the numbers. His initial check of the data was completed by the end of August. It flagged roughly 600 deaths for further investigation by the Health Department, the people said, but did not alter the fact that by then more than 9,000 nursing home residents had died in the pandemic. It was then, just as the initial audit was completed, that the Trump administration publicly requested data on deaths of nursing home residents. The request came from the Justice Department and was limited to publicly run nursing homes — a few dozen out of the more than 600 nursing homes in New York. Officials saw the move as a political ploy to embarrass Democratic governors. The inquiry would become a new reason offered by Mr. Cuomo’s office for withholding the data: Ms. DeRosa would later say in a Zoom call to legislators that she and other Cuomo aides “froze” because of the federal request. But top legislative officials told The Times in interviews that was not the reason they were given at the time. “That was never expressed to us before. It was just, ‘We need accuracy, we’ll get back to you,’” said Senator Gustavo Rivera, the chair of the health committee. Behind the scenes, health officials and Mr. Rhodes urged finally releasing the data containing the total number of deaths, noting that the small percentage of those flagged for possible errors in the audit could be added later. By early September, the Health Department had shared its draft letter with Mr. Cuomo’s office for approval. But approval never came. It was not sent to legislators. At about the same time, on Sept. 9, the governor’s office provided the data that the Trump administration had requested. “The chamber responded to the D.O.J. request with what they deemed to be totally accurate numbers,” Mr. Abramowitz said. “They didn’t want to have a public debate about other numbers at the same time.” “What’s going on in the press now is exactly what the chamber wanted to avoid while William Barr was A.G.,” he added, referring to Mr. Trump’s attorney general. State lawmakers and reporters continued to ask about the missing figures. During a telephone news conference on Columbus Day — Oct. 12 — Mr. Cuomo was again asked when the numbers would be released. “On the numbers, there’s a lot of politics being played,” Mr. Cuomo told reporters. Later that day, Mr. Cuomo convened a call about the data on total deaths with Ms. DeRosa, Dr. Zucker and other health officials, according to two people with knowledge of the call. He suggested the figures would have to come out at some point. (A spokesman for Mr. Cuomo, Richard Azzopardi, said Ms. DeRosa did not take part in the call.) Mr. Cuomo’s book, for which he received a multimillion-dollar advance, was published the next day. It quickly became a best seller. Some on the call believed that the governor’s interest meant that he wanted the numbers released, according to the people with knowledge of the conversation. But Mr. Cuomo threw another wrench in the system, the people said: He asked for further analysis of the data. “He was interested in putting out only accurate information to highlight the contrast between Albany and Washington,” said Mr. Abramowitz.
LOL on the explanation. Gov. Cuomo insists nursing home deaths were covered up for ‘accuracy’ https://nypost.com/2021/04/29/cuomo-insists-nursing-home-deaths-covered-up-for-accuracy/
Governor Mengele making the big bucks off of his Death Camps for Granny routine. Disgusting. He should be in prison. Gov. Cuomo got $5.1M for COVID book despite nursing home deaths https://nypost.com/2021/05/17/gov-cuomo-got-5m-for-covid-book-despite-nursing-home-deaths/