Andrew Cuomo administration hid nursing home deaths out of fear Trump would prosecute them: report

On Thursday, according to the New York Post, an aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) has admitted that the state government didn't report the true number of deaths in nursing homes — in part out of fear that former President Donald Trump would order federal prosecutors to build a case against them.

"The stunning admission of a cover-up was made by Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa during a video conference call with state Democratic leaders in which she said the Cuomo administration had rebuffed a legislative request for the tally in August because 'right around the same time, [Trump] turns this into a giant political football,' according to an audio recording of the two-hour-plus meeting," reported Bernadette Hogan, Carl Campanile and Bruce Golding.

"He starts tweeting that we killed everyone in nursing homes," DeRosa said. "He starts going after [New Jersey Gov. Phil] Murphy, starts going after [California Gov. Gavin] Newsom, starts going after [Michigan Gov.] Gretchen Whitmer," said DeRosa on the call, adding that Trump "direct[ed] the Department of Justice to do an investigation into us ... and basically, we froze."

Last March, Cuomo's health officials directed nursing homes in New York not to refuse access to COVID-19 patients released from hospitals as long as they were medically stable.

This in and of itself wasn't necessarily out of line with medical consensus at the time; the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had similar guidelines for nursing homes, to ensure hospitals didn't run out of beds. But unlike CMS, New York's order did not explicitly have an exception for facilities that didn't have the full ability to isolate and treat COVID-19 patients. This may have worsened the spread among a population that was particularly at risk of life-threatening complications, and has become a sharp controversy as Cuomo has sought to tout his efforts to contain the virus in his state as a success story.

Trump himself, who seized on the mismanagement of nursing home policy in New York to try to shift blame off his own pandemic response failures, may ultimately have made the problem worse, by repealing regulations that allowed nursing home residents and their families to sue over substandard health practices.