Editorial
Gov. Andrew Cuomo and his administration made a critical mistake in March 2020 by ordering nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients for recovery — thus bringing the coronavirus into the place it was most deadly. And worse — much worse — it has now been confirmed that the governor and his appointees tried to cover it up by withholding statistics about the deaths that resulted from this mistake.
Thanks to state records the Associated Press obtained this week after six months of resistance by the Cuomo administration, we now know more than 9,000 recovering COVID patients were moved from hospitals to nursing homes early in the pandemic as a result of this state Department of Health directive. From those 9,000, the virus spread to workers and fellow residents. Thousands of nursing home residents died of COVID-19 around that time, and it only stands to reason that many would still be alive if the virus hadn’t gotten into their homes through these hospital transfers.