New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Monday defended his management of nursing homes, where thousands of elderly people died during the coronavirus crisis, following the controversy that arose when it was known that his administration was hiding data of the deceased in homes from lawmakers of natural fear of the government. from Donald Trump.
“We didn’t provide all the requested information and created a void, and misinformation filled the void. That misinformation has upset people, confused those who lost a loved one, and made conspiracy theories grow,” Cuomo said after a press conference. asked about the matter and assured that “anything that could be done was done.”
“To be clear, all deaths in homes and hospitals were always fully, publicly and correctly reported; the numbers were the numbers,” said the governor, who nevertheless admitted that there was “a delay in providing additional data to the public and the press”. that categorized deaths because his government was “managing a pandemic.
The controversy started when the conservative local newspaper The New York Post revealed on Thursday that Cuomo’s close assistant, Melissa DeRosa, admitted in a Zoom appeal with state lawmakers that she had delayed the release of those figures due to a possible investigation by Donald Trump’s administration. .
Since then, numerous Republican and Democratic lawmakers have called for the repeal of executive powers granted to the governor by the state of emergency, which he attributed to a “toxic political environment.”
“We were frozen because we were in a situation where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Justice Department” or to lawmakers “would be used against us,” DeRosa said during the call, according to a transcript she wrote herself Friday. published.
Cuomo said today that he has informed the state’s two legislative chambers that he was “prioritizing” a “request for information” from Justice compared to the request that lawmakers had made regarding the numbers, something that some lawmakers have questioned. who say they have had no knowledge of the matter so far.
The governor has already been accused of ‘making up’ for the number of deaths from coronavirus in nursing homes in New York, the epicenter of the US pandemic in spring 2020, after Attorney General Letitia James issued a comprehensive report .
In it, James claimed that Cuomo officials had not included all those elderly people who were transferred from these types of centers to hospitals and who ended up dying there in the total of nursing home deaths.
Last January, James denounced in another report that the state has not counted thousands of deaths from covid-19 recorded in nursing homes, which could be up to 50% higher than the official one, which is 8,500 by the state government.