Nursing home executives were “petrified” by Governor Cuomo’s orders to send elderly patients to long-term care facilities rather than hospitals during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new interview.
Michael Kraus, a Staten Island nursing home administrator, said his concerns had been “shot down” by government officials.
“A lot of facilities have spoken out,” Kraus said in a Fox News interview that aired in full Thursday. “They were petrified, but they were petrified even more from the Health Ministry… agree [my concern] was shot, I never spoke [about it] again.”
The Cuomo government is facing a federal investigation for ruining the response to the health crisis in nursing homes and then obscuring the actual death toll.
Last month, the State Department of Health admitted that more than 15,000 nursing and long-term care residents died from COVID-10 in the state – nearly twice as many as the approximately 8,700 deaths that state officials initially claimed.
Last month, The Post reported exclusively that one of Cuomo’s top aides, Melissa DeRosa, told Democratic leaders in a video conference that “we were frozen” for fear that the real numbers would be “used against us” by federal prosecutors.
Cuomo’s top advisers have also successfully pushed government officials to exclude nursing home residents who have died in hospitals from COVID-19 from the death toll – skewing the aggregate total.
Cuomo’s nursing home scandal is under investigation by the FBI and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn.
His order of March 25, 2020 was withdrawn two months later.
Cuomo has downplayed the debacle and declined to apologize for the misuse.
“Who cares [if they] died in hospital, died in a nursing home? They died, ”he said at a press conference in January.