Cuomo’s Top Aides Altered Nursing Home COVID Death Data To Save Their Own Butts

Top aides in New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office altered a Health Department report last summer to omit the deaths of approximately 9,000 nursing home residents who succumbed to COVID-19, the New York Times reports.

In a scandalous development to the nearly yearlong saga that stemmed from Cuomo’s March 25, 2020 policy, which said elderly patients with COVID-19, discharged from hospitals, should return to their care facilities, the governor’s top aides deliberately changed an internal Health Department report released in July, giving the administration the ammunition it needed to pretend there was nothing wrong and that most of the patients returned to nursing homes “were no longer contagious when admitted and therefore were not a source of infection.” While “state health officials could see from the data that a significant number of residents died after being transferred to hospitals,” that data was omitted.

Instead of simply including the death toll in the report as previously suggested by the state health commissioner and others, the Health Department became defensive as the narrative surrounding the release of the true numbers shifted, and officials began “disputing that the numbers had been ready in time for the report and saying that, regardless, they would not have changed its conclusions.” Some of these internal debates, the Times notes, prompted the departure of nine New York state health officials over the last year.