Head of State Andrew Cuomo again justified his administration’s decision to stop counting as deceased nursing homes the COVID-19 deaths of residents who underwent it after being transferred to hospitals, but ultimately acknowledged at least one mistake he made during the crisis in coronavirus.
‘I was the first state in the nation to make masks, I had done it before. I had done masks before. That would have made a dramatic difference, “Cuomo told WAMC radio.
The three-time Democratic governor issued a statewide mask order on April 15 – 45 days after New York had its first confirmed case of coronavirus and in a period when the state experienced more than 600 virus-related deaths daily.
Cuomo also acknowledged “we were wrong” in saying that asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19 could not spread the killer bug.
‘That was just wrong,’ said the governor, adding, ‘we have spent months having to be sneezed or coughed. That was just wrong. ”
Cuomo said he has now conducted his own research and that articles in a medical journal dating from January and February showed that there was evidence of asymptomatic spread.
But, Cuomo said, “that’s not a state function, that’s really a federal function … with the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]. ”
“Most of these problems are not in control of the state, exactly. “They are mostly federal causes, this is a global pandemic issue,” he said.
There was a “very litany” of mistakes made, according to Cuomo, when he explained, “We were late to find the virus here. We were wrong when we said it was asymptomatic, we were wrong. “when we said you could not be re-infected. Collectively – we made a lot of mistakes.”
Meanwhile, Cuomo doubled the beginning of his decision by the health department in early May to leave the deaths of nursing home residents in hospitals in the official death toll from nursing homes, which is now at least 6,400.
“The question is when one goes from a nursing home to a hospital, and the person dies in the hospital that is now called a hospital death,” Cuomo said.
Cuomo added, “Some people say, ‘No, that should be considered a parental death’ – well, then you should reduce hospital deaths and you should die a death at a nursing home if it did not happen in a nursing home. , it happened in a hospital. ”
The governor went on to say, ‘If I were a nursing home business, I would say: do not say that people died in my nursing home because they did not have that, they died in the hospital. And if the hospital did a better job, they would not have died. So why do I get blamed for death if it did not happen in my nursing home? ”
Cuomo said it simply “depends on how you want to argue it.”
‘If you died in a nursing home, it’s called dying at home. If you die in a hospital, it’s called a hospital death, “said Cuomo, who argued that the state runs the risk of” double “counting deaths if they are not told so.
The Cuomo administration has refused to divide the number of nursing home residents transferred to hospitals and died there, raising questions about the state’s official death toll from COVID-19-related nursing homes.
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