NEW YORK – New York Governor Andrew Cuomo made a rare acknowledgment of a misstep in his response to COVID-19 on Wednesday, when he said a previous state mask mandate could have made a “dramatic difference” in the fight against coronavirus this spring.
Cuomo, who has been hailed by his party because COVID-19 infection rates have fallen in New York, offered the misstep as an example of a lesson for other states in an appearance on public radio.
Cuomo’s executive order effective April 17 required all people over the age of two to wear a face covering, if medically tolerable, when in public and unable to maintain physical distance. At the time, several other states had announced less restrictive mandates or warnings: New Jersey required workers and customers to wear fabric face covers beginning April 10, and an April 10 directive in Utah urged residents to use covers when social distancing was not possible. .
“I was the first state in the nation to make masks. I should have done it sooner. I should have made masks sooner,” Cuomo said at WAMC. “That would have made a dramatic difference.”
It’s a rare admission for a governor who has said he doesn’t want a “blame game,” but has pointed to the failure of the federal government itself when asked if his administration was ever wrong in responding to a little-known virus that rocked to the state.
Despite acknowledging this on Wednesday, Cuomo was quick to repeat his central argument that it is up to the federal government to watch for signs of a global pandemic and quickly come up with clear recommendations.
“Most of these issues are not under the control of the state,” said Cuomo, who is the new president of the National Association of Governors.
The Cuomo administration says that at least 25,270 patients who tested positive for COVID-19 have died in hospitals and nursing homes, an insufficient count that excludes at least 4,600 deaths of people who likely had COVID-19 in New York City alone. .
As part of the same interview at WAMC, Cuomo responded to the AP report that the number of coronavirus deaths in nursing homes in the state could be an undercount, and said it makes sense to only include residents who died in the state. home ownership.
Unlike the federal government and all other states with major outbreaks, only New York explicitly says that it counts only residents who died on nursing home property and not those who were transported to hospitals and died there.
“If you die in the nursing home, it’s a death in the nursing home. If you die in the hospital, it’s called a hospital death,” he said. “It doesn’t say where you were before.”
The governor added that if New York were to count a death as one death in an asylum and one death in a hospital, that could lead to a “double count.”
“And if I’m a nursing home operator, I say, ‘Don’t say that person died in my nursing home, because they didn’t,’” Cuomo said. “They died in the hospital. And if the hospital had done a better job, they wouldn’t have died. So why am I to blame for the death when it didn’t happen in my nursing home? So it depends on how you want to argue it.”
Some New York lawmakers have accused the Cuomo administration of refusing to release the full count to make it appear their state is doing better than others in the nursing home crisis and making the tragic situation less dire. .
The AP report found that the official New York nursing home death count of more than 6,620 is not only an undercount, but is likely undervalued by thousands of deaths. She pointed out how a separate federal count from May included deaths of hospital residents and was 65 percent higher than the comparable state count that did not.
New York’s tally allows it to promote a percentage of nursing home deaths among its total deaths that is 20 percent, up to three times smaller than neighboring states. If New York were even at the national average of 44 percent, that would translate to more than 11,000 nursing home deaths.
Several lawmakers criticized Cuomo during a live-streamed forum on the nursing home issue Wednesday, saying his health officials have blocked his request for the number of nursing home residents who died in hospitals for more than two weeks. . One accused Cuomo of being more interested in promoting his next book on the crisis than being transparent about nursing homes.
“Don’t publish a damn book now. Take responsibility for what’s happening,” said State Senator Gustavo Rivera, Democrat, during the discussion hosted by the Empire Report news site.
In a legislative hearing on Aug. 3, New York Health Commissioner Howard Zucker acknowledged that the state keeps a running tally of deaths of nursing home residents in hospitals, but refused to provide it to lawmakers until that its accuracy can be verified.
Lawmakers say they have not received a response since. The AP has also been denied similar data on nursing home deaths that it sought through a public records request more than three months ago.
“It’s obviously ridiculous,” said Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, a Democrat, during the forum. “When you ask an important question and his answer is patently ridiculous, it is clear that something is really wrong here.”
Researchers are still studying why the virus, which may have spread to New York in February, took hold so quickly and fatally in the densely populated metropolis and surrounding states.
In late March, officials with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told reporters that they were considering whether to change their recommendations about who should wear masks in light of preliminary research suggesting that the people without symptoms were spreading COVID-19.
Cuomo had expressed initial skepticism about the imposition of the widespread use of masks, at a time of widespread concern about leaving healthcare workers homeless. He stated Wednesday that he is now aware of those studies.
“And by the way, I did the research now,” Cuomo said. “There were articles written in the New England Journal of Medicine going back to January, February saying there was asymptomatic spread.”
Cuomo and New York’s top health official initially downplayed the need for a mask mandate at an April 3 press conference, when The Associated Press asked about the call from New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, for New Yorkers to wear masks in light of a Singaporean study of asymptomatic people. spread.
State Health Commissioner Howard Zucker said “there is no clear evidence” to support the use of cloth masks or face coverings in general among the public. And Cuomo, who had at times criticized his fellow Democrat and political rival to Blasio for his efforts to combat the virus, said covering your face wouldn’t hurt unless it gave someone a false sense of security.
“But could it hurt?” Cuomo said at the time. “Could I help you? I think it’s fair to say yes, but don’t have a false sense of security that now you don’t have to socially distance yourself and you don’t have to take normal precautions because you’re wearing a scarf.”
Cuomo has a book to be published on October 13 on the state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and the lessons it has learned so far. He told reporters early Wednesday that he would make a donation to a “COVID-related entity” with proceeds from the book, but did not reveal any further details.
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