Governor Cuomo has been lauded by many for his response to COVID-19. His daily press briefings and overconfidence attracted attention and praise quickly. However, his incompetence in dealing with the virus, and his willingness to blame everyone but himself for the deaths in his state, shows that he failed New York state.
The evidence is in: Cuomo’s strategy wasn’t as successful as his fans claim. New York’s deaths per million is currently the second highest in the country (behind only New Jersey). One major reason for this is Cuomo’s executive order stating that nursing homes had to accept COVID positive cases. Anywhere from 4,300 to 6,300 recovering COVID patients were put into nursing homes, which caused major outbreaks and a devastating number of deaths. This order was eventually reversed in May, but the damage had been done. Instead of implementing policies to protect the at-risk elderly population, like Governor DeSantis did (he created COVID specific nursing homes so as not to mix recovering patients with healthy elderly), Governor Cuomo endangered—and ultimately killed—senior citizens. He then refused to take the blame.
After people realized this mistake, Cuomo knew he had to acknowledge it. Instead of taking responsibility and apologizing to the heartbroken families who lost loved ones, he began pointing fingers to everybody but himself. He cited a study by the New York Health Department (meaning it was not independent; it was conducted by his own administration) that claimed the real cause of increased death rates in nursing homes was infected staff members, not infected patients. However, many experts have pointed out major flaws in the study, including that there is no data on nursing homes that had no cases before the executive order. This means that the study only looked at nursing homes with those known to have positive patients before the executive order and therefore does not look at patients who were forced into nursing homes afterwards. Another issue is the study does not include elderly individuals who were moved and died in the hospital rather than in the nursing home. There are arguments to be made about the extent in which this order had an effect on the death toll, but for Governor Cuomo to claim it is not a major contributing factor is simply avoiding blame.
In recent weeks, there have been major spikes of COVID cases across the country. Even though New York isn’t experiencing the same surge as other states, no state’s death toll—even with this latest wave of cases—has topped New York’s. Some, including Cuomo himself, are claiming New York “beat COVID” because they are not experiencing the same spike as states like Arizona. The spike in cases, however, started around Memorial Day Weekend—at the same time that protests broke out across the country, and people likely got together for cookouts and celebrations. The spikes therefore are not necessarily from states opening up too soon, like Cuomo and Democrats want to claim. Besides—states started reopening two weeks earlier than Memorial Day. This means their spikes should have been sooner, and even states such as California, who never fully opened back up, have seen spikes.
There are, however, concerns that New York is seeing a rise in cases and deaths. Because of this, Governor Cuomo has begun to pause phases of reopening, often citing “large gatherings” as a major concern, even though he did not stop the large protests in his state. And yet people are still praising Cuomo, and he’s certainly been throwing himself a victory party. He came out with a poster about New York “beating COVID,” was a guest on Jimmy Fallon’s show laughing about his dating life, and continues to blame President Trump for his own incompetence. Jake Tapper, a CNN host, even critiqued Cuomo’s poster stating, "There are no illustrations, however, of the more than 32,000 dead New Yorkers, the highest death toll by far of any state. No rendering on that poster of the criticism that Governor Cuomo ignored warnings, no depiction of the study that he could have saved thousands of lives had he and Mayor De Blasio acted sooner, no painting of his rescinded order that nursing homes take all infected patients in.”
Governor Cuomo failed to protect his state and his people, yet he has been praised by many in the media for his leadership. He consistently refuses to take responsibility, and instead blames nursing home workers and the President. It is time for Cuomo to apologize to his people, and for the country to be honest about the disaster over which he presided.