The United States lost 1.2 million people, more than any country on the globe, to COVID. The obvious question is why?
President Donald Trump recklessly and negligently politicized COVID from the very beginning: He was up for reelection and he knew many people would die. His main tactic was avoidance: to downplay the severity of the virus, deny any and all responsibility, and then to blame the Democratic governors for mismanagement. It was a complete failure of Trump’s leadership.
Once again it is an election year, and once again MAGA Republicans are looking to blame everyone else for the COVID debacle: Dr. Tony Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx, the WHO, the Wuhan laboratory and state governments. The Republicans on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic have been obviously political and aggressive but the one place they won’t look is in the mirror and the one word they won’t utter is “Trump,” the president of the United States at the time.
New York was ground zero. We had the highest infection rate on the globe and it had been coming in for months before the federal government had any idea. New York is also a Democratic stronghold. I was doing daily briefings that were attracting millions of viewers and I was often critical of Trump. Obviously, we became his prime target.
The MAGA echochamber excels at disinformation and it was imperative for them to distract from Trump’s abysmal performance so they furiously spun conspiracies. However, as John Adams said, “facts are stubborn things.”
Let’s clear away the distortions and learn from what really happened during COVID.
False statement #1: New York State experienced an overwhelming disproportionate number of nursing home deaths, and total deaths, which were caused by bad state policy.
Even when you play Monday morning quarterback, you can’t change the score.
New York State had far fewer nursing home deaths pro rata than most states. Indeed, according to a study in the NIH library using CMS data, New York had the 12th lowest nursing home death rate of all 50 states by the end of 2020. According to CDC data, New York’s overall COVID death rate fell from the second highest in the country in 2020 to the 30th in 2021, when death rates in most red states went up — even after the vaccine had been introduced.
Importantly, the other states weren’t blindsided the way we were. They had months to watch, prepare and learn the lessons from the experience the Northeast was forced to endure as a result of Trump failing to put a timely travel ban from Europe in place.
They also had vaccines, which unfortunately many failed to implement.
False statement #2: New York’s March 25 health advisory said nursing homes “must admit” COVID positive patients and that’s how COVID got into nursing homes.
Unlike Trump, I did not make medical decisions, the state Department of Health did. On March 25, DOH issued an advisory that followed federal guidance issued days earlier by the CMS and CDC that allowed nursing homes to accept medically stable patients into nursing homes.
At least 12 states — Republican and Democratic alike — issued similar guidance. How could that happen with so many diverse states across the country without a federal template? As Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said, “This was federal guidance. This was what everyone was doing.”
The underlying federal principles were clear: Making seniors remain in hospitals longer than necessary risked dangerous secondary infections and many of them required the specialized services of a nursing home. Also, hospital beds were scarce and needed to be utilized appropriately.
In New York, hospital discharge planners needed to confirm by telephone that the resident was medically stable for return and comprehensive discharge instructions needed to be provided by the hospital prior to transport to the nursing home. Further, admissions to nursing homes were subject to the nursing homes’ acceptance. Nursing homes — by law — were required to have infection control plans in place tailored to individuals and were told to follow CDC infection prevention and control procedures.
To the extent that partisan critics claim there was confusion about nursing homes’ legal obligation to be able to care for COVID residents before agreeing to admit them, the state attorney general found “OAG’s investigation to date has not revealed an admission from any nursing home operator that they could not care for referred residents.”
The data is unequivocal: the patient readmission policies did not introduce COVID into nursing homes. In New York 304 of the 310 nursing homes — or 98% — of the nursing homes that accepted admissions from hospitals already had COVID in their facilities Some states that did not have the same admission policies had higher mortality rates than states that did.
Many authorities, academic universities, and highly credible, independent, infectious disease experts have since determined that COVID entered nursing homes by asymptomatic staff members, unknowingly walking the virus in the front door from January to May before testing was widely available.
However, Trump was not interested in facts, but rather weaponizing people’s pain for politics.
In what was described as a “nakedly corrupt move,” Trump went so far as to direct the DOJ to investigate four Democratic — and only Democratic — governors’ management of nursing homes. The federal review (which was later closed as a result of no evidence of wrongdoing) triggered state and local investigations across the country.
In New York, the Department of Justice — three times — the Manhattan district attorney, the AG, the state Assembly and an outside firm hired by the State of New York all investigated and not a single one validated the accusation of wrongdoing or that the March 25 guidance was a contributing factor, let alone the cause, of COVID being introduced into nursing homes. Undeterred, MAGA Republicans continued to repeat these falsehoods.
Indeed, the AG — no friend of mine — affirmatively verified the DOH guidance was consistent with the prior guidelines already in place and issued by the feds, unequivocally stating, “the March 25 guidance was consistent with the CMS guidance…It was also consistent with CDC Published Transmission-Based Precaution (T-BP) guidance, which was referred to in CMS’s March 4 guidance…”
This conclusion was echoed in a June review by the Olson Group, an independent consulting firm retained by the Hochul administration — which also has no motivation to portray my administration in a favorable light. It found the state’s COVID nursing home policies were “consistent with universal best practices in congregate care and accurately reflected the best understanding of the scientific community at the time they were issued”.
False statement #3: New York undercounted the number of deaths in nursing homes to cover-up the improper management.
First, there was no improper management.
Second, state practice predating the pandemic was always to record deaths by the place of death, a practice that was clear from the very beginning.
At every briefing I identified the number of people who died in hospitals and in nursing homes. MAGA forces then embraced a demand to know the number of people who died in hospitals, but had originally come from nursing homes. It was a political ploy and an unnecessary administrative burden in the middle of fighting a pandemic. I said when we had accurate numbers we would release them, but I would not release false information.
What those numbers show — as I wrote earlier — was that New York was No. 12 of the states with the lowest pro rata nursing home deaths.
Any objective review would recognize the unique position of New York as the first and hardest hit, and the everyday New Yorkers who rose to the occasion.
We had the highest infection rate on the globe, but New Yorkers followed the science. We stood up the most extensive testing operation in the nation. We were very aggressive in vaccinating our citizens, which saved thousands of lives. New Yorkers acted responsibly with social distancing and mask wearing. We reduced our exploding infection rate quicker than experts believed possible.
We avoided what was projected to be an inevitable overwhelming of our hospital system. We had a data driven reopening plan for our state. Our first responders were true heroes facing an invisible enemy before anyone knew how it spread.
The real question is how any state could possibly have lost more people than New York, given the circumstances. One should also ask how the U.S. — with the most sophisticated medical system on the globe — lost more people to COVID than any other country.
Trump played politics with the virus and the virus won. His failure to lead was bad government and bad politics. He lost the election and hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their lives unnecessarily.
The MAGA Republicans in Congress should stop the political games and actually do their jobs. Answer the question: “What went wrong during COVID and how do we make sure it never happens again?”
Cuomo was the 56th governor of the State of New York.