NEW YORK, NY – After a revealing and shocking report was released today by the New York State Attorney General’s Office claiming Governor Andrew Cuomo underreported the number of nursing home deaths, the governor dismissed the allegation.
Instead of accepting responsibility, Cuomo defended his count, saying that if a person in a nursing home got sick enough to require hospitalization for COVID-19 and died in the hospital, that death is not a nursing home death.
“And if I’m a nursing home operator, I say: ‘Don’t say that person died in my nursing home, because they didn’t,’” Cuomo said in response to the report. ‘They died in the hospital. And if the hospital did a better job, they wouldn’t have died. So why do I get the blame for the death when it didn’t happen in my nursing home?’ So it depends on how you want to argue it.”\
Cuomo has been under fire for his decision in March of 2020 to force nursing homes to accept discharged COVID-19 patients from hospitals while they still had the COVID-19 virus.
New York reports 6,620 official nursing home deaths. Now, according to the Attorney General’s office, that figure could be as high as 12,000 deaths.