Top aides to Governor Andrew Cuomo changed a COVID-19 report in July, making it appear that fewer nursing home residents died during the pandemic, according to new reporting by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
Many Democrats and most Republicans are continuing to call for the governor to resign after this latest scandal.
Democratic State Senator Rachel May says if these reports turn out to be true, Cuomo needs to resign.
“The Legislature has been frustrated with this governor for a very long time, but this just blows it up in a way that makes it almost impossible to move forward in real negotiations with the governor,” Senator May explained.
These new articles revealed that the state had the complete number of nursing home deaths, including resident deaths that occurred in hospitals, since last summer.
It took the Cuomo administration eight more months, an attorney general report and a lawsuit for the state to finally release that more than 15,000 long-term care residents have died during the pandemic.
Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt expressed his frustration with the lack of action on the part of the Legislature.
“Maybe if there is one more report, then maybe the governor would have to step down,” Senator Ortt said. “Maye if there is one more person that comes forward, one more scandal then that might be enough for the legislature to get back to doing its job.”
In the July report, Cuomo’s top aides removed the number of nursing home resident deaths in hospitals, arguing the complete data set wasn’t sufficiently verified.
They also reportedly changed one portion to say that the governor’s March 25 memo that allowed COVID-positive residents to be accepted in nursing homes did not lead to more nursing home deaths.
A Health Department spokesman in a statement released Thursday night said, “Even Bill Hammond of the conservative think tank Empire Center found that the March 25 advisory was not a primary driver of COVID in nursing homes.”
However, Hammond says that this is misleading.
“I would agree it wasn’t the single factor, it wasn’t even the dominant factor, but it was a factor,” Hammond explained. “And the Health Department’s report had said it wasn’t a factor. So we were contradicting their finding and for them to cherry pick and paraphrase a line out of that report in defense of their position now I think it is more deception, it is more misinformation.”
The state is claiming it didn’t change the data, but rather decided to use a different data set that did not contain nursing home resident deaths at hospitals.
Many more moderate Democrats are sticking by Cuomo’s side for now.
Assembly Majority Leader Peoples-Stokes during a floor debate on the Assembly floor, told her colleagues that people back home are "still not thinking that this governor has done a bad job,” referring to a recent Quinnipiac poll.
Many lawmakers are also waiting to see what comes out of the attorney general investigation into the sexual harassment allegations against Cuomo and for the U.S. Department of Justice to finish its investigation into these nursing home deaths.