Thread by @dwallacewells

In his book American Crisis, Andrew Cuomo addressed his nursing home policy in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic at some length. It was always a defensive, tone-deaf account; given what we now know about his data falsification, it is outrageous. A thread... (1/x)

"The most painful aspect of the COVID crisis has been its
devastating effect on our elderly in nursing homes," he writes. "Understanding the threat, on March 13, we were taking every precaution that we could think of."

"Even before New York had a single COVID death, we banned visitors from going into nursing homes for fear that they might be transmitting the virus, and we required PPE, temperature checks, and cohorting of residents with COVID."

"By early spring, Republicans needed an offense to distract
from the narrative of their botched federal response—and they needed it badly. So they decided to attack Democratic governors and blame them for nursing home deaths."

"The entire episode was truly despicable. Imagine having lost a loved one in a nursing home. You are already questioning yourself about whether you should have removed them and then you hear their life was lost because of a government blunder."

"Unfortunately, although I tried, I never successfully communicated the facts on this situation," Cuomo writes, appallingly.

"The Trump forces had a simple line: 'Thousands died in nursing homes,'" Cuomo writes, acknowledging, at least, that this "was true."

"But they needed to add a conspiracy, which was that they died because of a bad state policy that 'mandated and directed' that the nursing homes accept COVID-positive people.'"

What follows is an elaborate, legalistic defense of state policy, which Cuomo insists was not that nursing homes were "mandated and directed" to accept COVID-positive patients but that patients could not be rejected "solely on the basis" of COVID status. What is the difference?

"No law or policy would have ever required a nursing home to take any COVID positive person," he insists. "The policy was that nursing homes couldn’t discriminate, not that they had to accept. That makes all the difference in the world."

But it is in his description of the data that the governor is at his most outrageous. "The facts totally defeated the Republican claim," he writes. "This was not even a New York–specific issue. Quite the opposite."

"New York was number forty-six out of fifty in the nation when it came to percentage of deaths in nursing homes. There were only four states with a lower percentage of nursing home deaths, and New York had a much worse situation to manage."

"But this was all politics. No one wanted to hear the facts." Just imagine writing that, given what we know now about the state's concerted data blockade. (x/x)