BUFFALO, N.Y. (WBEN) - Governor Andrew Cuomo said Monday his administration previously told state legislative leaders about the federal investigation into his handling of the nursing home controversy.
"Both houses were told," Cuomo said. "The state legislators are wrong. Both houses were told that we had the DOJ and were going to give precedent to the DOJ request. They were both told. Yes, we gave the department of justice request precedence over the state legislators request."
The comments from Cuomo come days after renewed scrutiny over his handling of the nursing home crisis. One of his top aides, Melissa DeRosa, told a group of democratic lawmakers that New York State froze their inquiry into nursing home deaths because of the launch of a federal probe.
Cuomo said that while 36% of all coronavirus deaths nationwide come from nursing home residents, the population itself accounts for less than 1%. More than 13,000 nursing home residents in New York have died from coronavirus.
"All the deaths in the nursing homes and the hospitals were always fully, publicly, and accurately reported," Cuomo said. "The numbers were the numbers, always. People did request information beyond the place of death...Everyone was busy. Everyone was here every day. We were in the midst of handling the pandemic. There was a delay in providing the press and the public all that additional information."
The governor said he regretted not addressing the nursing home scandal before, saying it created a void that led to disinformation.
"We should have done a better job in providing better information," Cuomo said. "We should have done a better job at knocking down the disinformation. You never knock down the political conspiracy theories because they generate ten a day, but we should have done a better job of providing as much information as we could as quickly as we could. We should have done a better job on that. No excuses. I accept responsibility for that. I am in charge."
The governor's comments didn't satisfy state Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Democrat and outspoken critic of the administration's approach to nursing homes during the pandemic. Kim's uncle died of a presumed case of COVID-19 in a New York nursing home in April.
“I didn’t think it was much of an apology,” Kim said. “It doesn’t pass the smell test.”
“But what gets lost, ultimately, is: If they were transparent, if they did disclose everything in real time, we could have had different policies ... and that would have had a different outcome in how we protected our communities.”
The head of a major association of New York nursing homes said the state erred by focusing too much on hospitals early in the pandemic and leaving nursing homes "scrambling to safeguard their residents and staff.”
“Policymakers and legislators must stop the blame game" and work more closely with nursing homes, said Stephen Hanse, CEO of the New York State Health Facilities Association and New York State Center for Assisted Living.
State lawmakers have been calling for investigations, stripping Cuomo of his emergency powers and even his resignation after new details emerged this week about why certain nursing home data wasn't disclosed for months, despite requests from lawmakers and others.
First, a report late last month from Democratic state Attorney General Letitia James examined the administration’s failure to tally nursing home residents' deaths at hospitals. The state then acknowledged the total number of long-term care residents' deaths is nearly 15,000, up from the 8,500 previously disclosed.
Next, in reply to a Freedom of Information request from the Associated Press, the state Health Department released records this week showing that more than 9,000 recovering coronavirus patients in New York were released from hospitals into nursing homes in the pandemic's early months — over 40% higher than the state had said previously, because it wasn't counting residents who returned from hospitals to homes where they already had lived.
Cuomo and his administration have maintained that the hospital patients didn't drive nursing home outbreaks, saying the patients likely weren't contagious anymore and virtually all the homes that admitted them had cases already. Still, the governor stopped allowing such admissions in May.
Late this week, it emerged that top Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa had told Democratic lawmakers that the tally of nursing home residents' deaths at hospitals — data that legislators had sought since August — was delayed because officials worried that the information was “going to be used against us” by the Trump administration’s Department of Justice.
Echoing an explanation DeRosa gave Friday, Cuomo said the state was slow to respond to the lawmakers because officials prioritized dealing with requests from the Justice Department and were busy dealing with the work of the pandemic: “It’s not like people were in the South of France,” he said.
“When we didn’t provide information, it allowed press, people, cynics, politicians, to fill the void," he said, and “it created confusion and cynicism and pain for the families.”
“The truth is: Everybody did everything they could.”
But nursing home residents' advocate Richard Mollot said the state has fallen short for years on overseeing nursing home care.
“The governor has the power to take the steps necessary to ensure that nursing homes dedicate the resources needed to ensure safety,” said Mollot, the executive director of the Long Term Care Community Coalition. “Every day of delay is another day of unnecessary suffering.”
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