BUFFALO, N.Y. (WBEN) –Governor Andrew Cuomo continues to receive criticisms over his handling of a March executive order to send COVID-positive residents back to a nursing homes.
“It wasn’t a mistake,” Cuomo told MSNBC of his executive order on Tuesday.
The governor continued to say that he followed federal guidelines, though the federal government never had any guidelines that suggested nursing homes should welcome back residents who were positive with coronavirus. Governor Cuomo’s comments were independently fact checked to be false.
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“By the time a person was transferred after nine or ten days, they were no longer contagious,” Cuomo said. “What all the data says is the reason you had the infection in nursing homes were because the staff brought in the infections. You look at the communities that had the high infection rate overall, those are the communities that had nursing homes with a high infection rate.”
New York has confirmed approximately 3,500 coronavirus deaths in nursing homes. Another 2,500 deaths were presumed to be from coronavirus.
Reed last week was among a group of republican representatives who are calling for a federal investigation into New York, New Jersey, and other states that had a similar executive order.
Both Reed and Cuomo accused the opposite political parties of playing politics over this situation.