I have recently finished reading New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s inexplicable book, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic. I happened to come up on the hold list at the library shortly after the Attorney General of New York, Letitia James, on January 28, released a report with a finding that the state had under counted nursing home related coronavirus deaths:
a larger number of nursing home residents died from COVID-19 than the New York State Department of Health’s (DOH) published nursing home data reflected and may have been undercounted by as much as 50 percent.
There have been continued new developments on a fairly regular basis related since then, including that the situation is being investigated by the FBI and the Brooklyn US Attorney’s Office.
While a top aide who was prominently featured in the book, Melissa DeRosa, subsequently admitted to their being an under count, Governor Cuomo has been unwilling to acknowledge what happened and claimed that he would counter unspecified “lies” and “misinformation”.
In the context of that situation, a lot of the book’s lines are cringeworthy. Here is one example of that:
I wanted people to understand that even in this time of slanted ‘news’ on both sides of the political spectrum, unvarnished truth still existed, and they could find it with me.
Near the end of the book, which was published in October, in a chapter labeled “May 10”, the topic of what happened related to nursing homes is discussed in some detail. There is a lot of obfuscation as to what happened, and then there is this incredible paragraph:
The facts totally defeated the Republican claim. Interestingly, this was not even a New York-specific issue. Quite the opposite. New York was number forty-six out of fifty in the nation when it came to percentage of deaths in nursing homes. There were only four states with a lower percentage of nursing home deaths, and New York had a much worse situation to manage But this was all politics. No one wanted to hear the facts.
