Cuomo Faulted for Pandemic Leadership but Not for Nursing Home Deaths

ALBANY, N.Y. — A long-awaited review of New York state’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic under former Gov. Andrew Cuomo declined to fault him for the thousands of people who died of COVID-19 at nursing homes.

The report said the nursing home deaths in New York were largely consistent with national outcomes, but it nonetheless criticized Cuomo’s decision to centralize the state’s pandemic response in his office as “a significant and unnecessary mistake.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul commissioned the review, which was conducted by the Olson Group, a consulting firm, after she succeeded Cuomo in 2021. The purpose was to scrutinize New York’s handling of a crisis that shuttered businesses, strained social services and relegated millions of children to remote learning.

Investigators found that Cuomo’s consolidation of authority led to a troubling lack of coordination within his administration. While crediting the administration’s timely release of information to the public at daily press briefings, the investigators also noted that doing so without internal coordination had led to confusion.

Cuomo, in a statement Friday, made no apologies for his leadership.

“We all lived through this,” he said, “and no rational person can believe that a coordinated centralized response is inferior to having decisions made by a gaggle of faceless bureaucrats.”

The report’s release came as Cuomo faces a new round of scrutiny over his handling of the pandemic, most recently from congressional Republicans on a House subcommittee that he testified before behind closed doors this week.

A particular focus of scrutiny has been Cuomo’s executive order on March 25, 2020, which required nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients from hospitals. Such homes, where some of New York’s most vulnerable residents were forced to live in close quarters as a highly contagious disease spread quickly, soon became overwhelmed, resulting in more than 15,000 deaths by June 2021.

A change in the way that COVID-19 fatalities were being reported stoked suspicions that Cuomo’s administration was obscuring the true death toll at nursing homes. In March 2022, the state comptroller’s office released an audit that found Cuomo had deliberately misled the public about the virus’s true impact on nursing homes, underreporting the death toll in nursing homes by 50%.

Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, the chair of the House subcommittee, criticized Cuomo sharply after his testimony, and in particular over what Wenstrup called the former governor’s “deadly guidance” to force nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients.

Rep. Nicole Malliotakis of Staten Island, the lone Republican representing New York City in the House, also criticized Cuomo over what she called his failure to take responsibility.

“We won’t let up until we get to the bottom of what occurred here, because we owe it to the families,” she said at a news conference.

Cuomo has defended his administration’s actions fiercely, arguing that they mirrored recommendations in other states and from the federal government.

His testimony to the House subcommittee has not been released publicly. But in a 20-minute video he put out as he was testifying, Cuomo lashed out at those who would scrutinize him as self-interested partisans.

“The COVID crisis is an example of the danger posed when political interests outweigh the interests of the American people,” he said, adding in a statement that New York’s death toll was proportionally lower than those of other states.

The report released on Friday acknowledged the challenge New York hospitals faced in spring 2020, as infection rates climbed and resources dwindled. It also pointed to the struggle to control the spread of infection in congregate settings, particularly for those that lacked protective gear and other resources, as well as the risk of infection among staff members.

Investigators describe the nursing home issue as “a source of emotional distress to families as well as an area where the state came up well short in terms of both perception and performance, although overall outcomes were not substantially inconsistent with overall performance in such facilities nationwide.”

But despite blaming Cuomo’s micromanaging of the pandemic response, the report does not dig deeper on who was responsible for the failures.

Instead, a note in the report’s conclusion says state officials “made it clear” that the report should focus on lessons for the future, rather than mistakes of the past.

Similarly, investigators do not address questions surrounding Cuomo’s decision to write a book about his administration’s handling of the pandemic even as the pandemic continued.

Cuomo initially received approval for the $5.1 million deal from the state ethics board, but the approval was subsequently revoked after board members said he had misrepresented the project and its use of state resources.

Cuomo has denied wrongdoing and successfully sued the ethics board over the decision. An appeal is pending.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .