Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s “medical malpractice” during the Covid-19 pandemic involved efforts to downplay nursing home deaths, according to a new report.
A final investigative report from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic came to a bipartisan consensus the three-term Democratic governor “publicly covered up the total number of nursing home fatalities in New York,” chair Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, wrote in an opening letter.
“Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s March 25 Order – which forced nursing homes to accept Covid-19 positive patients – was medical malpractice,” according to an overview of the 520-page report released on Monday. “Evidence shows that Mr. Cuomo and his Administration worked to cover up the tragic aftermath of their policy decisions in an apparent effort shield themselves from accountability.”
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The damning findings point to the tragic cost of Cuomo’s pandemic edicts, which were replicated by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and other Democratic governors.
The report details how the Cuomo administration revised Covid nursing home deaths from nearly 10,000 to 6,432 by manipulating the methodology of the reporting, and alleges the former governor “knowingly and willfully made false statements to the Select Subcommittee on numerous occasions about material aspects of New York’s Covid-19 nursing home disaster and the ensuring cover-up.
“The Select Subcommittee referred Mr. Cuomo to the [Department of Justice] for criminal prosecution,” the summary read.
Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Charlie LeDuff has suggested Whitmer should face the same scrutiny for downplaying Covid deaths in Michigan’s senior living facilities.
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While the Whitmer administration and media have repeatedly reported those deaths numbered about 5,600, LeDuff points to archived historic long term care data buried on the state’s website that reports total resident COVID deaths at 4,324, and an Office of the Auditor General report from 2021 that calculated total deaths at 8,061 based on data from the Electronic Death Registration System, Michigan Disease Surveillance System, Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, Medicaid, and other sources.
While the former purports to include all deaths through the end of the pandemic on May 9, 2023, and the latter only included deaths through July 2, 2021, neither include all of the long-term care facilities originally included in Whitmer’s Executive Order 2020-95 that allowed COVID-positive patients to return once stabilized at the hospital.
About 4,000 adult foster care facilities with fewer than 12 residents were excluded from the state’s data, or about 40% of those facilities in Michigan, as were assisted living facilities, which Definitive Healthcare estimates at 3,213, the second most in the U.S. behind California.
The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services “did not obtain any data from these facilities and eliminated the Covid-19 death reporting requirement for these facilities in October 2020,” the Auditor General report read, referencing assisted living facilities. “Because these facilities are not required to be licensed, we could not identify a complete listing of them and, therefore did not include them in our review.”
The report also noted that facilities it did review had underreported deaths by nearly 30%.
Michigan media outlets “continue to report 5,600 deaths in long term care facilities. The true number is more like 14,000,” LeDuff said. “That means Whitmer buried 7,000 corpses in a statistical mass grave.”
“That makes Michigan’s nursing home deaths by far the worst in America,” he said. “More than Florida, more than California, and almost as many as New York, which is twice as big and five times denser.”
While states including New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and others with similar policies recognized that returning COVID-positive patients to nursing homes was a bad idea and quickly reversed course, Whitmer’s administration never did.
“This makes Michigan’s response and Whitmer’s response (to the pandemic) ripe for a special prosecutor,” LeDuff said. “Instead of tamping down the pandemic, her response was to feed the flames. That led to more deaths, and then to lie about it.”