New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was celebrated in the early weeks for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. His approval ratings shot up and his conflicts with President Trump had some on the left toying with the idea of drafting Cuomo to replace Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket in November. And then the New York City area became a coronavirus hotspot, not just in the United States, but the hotspot of the world, and the combined failures of Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio were suddenly too difficult to deny.

A Wall Street Journal investigation published Thursday details how their response “was marred by missed warning signs and policies that many health-care workers say put residents at greater risk and led to unnecessary deaths.”

In the first few days of March, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio assured New Yorkers things were under control. On March 2, Mr. de Blasio tweeted that people should go see a movie.

Only after the disease had gripped the city’s low-income neighborhoods in early March did Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio mobilize public and private hospitals to create more beds and intensive-care units. The hasty expansion that ensued, led by New York government leaders and hospital administrators, produced mistakes that helped worsen the crisis, health-care workers say.

(Read more from “Investigation Reveals How NYC Made the Coronavirus Pandemic Worse” HERE)

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. . .That should have changed once it was clear that one of the hottest of the pandemic’s hotspots — New York’s nursing homes — were compelled by a state regulation to take in recovering coronavirus victims, many of whom were likely still contagious.

The implication of this rule — which was apparently strictly enforced and similar to the order issued by California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration — was that facilities filled with exactly the most vulnerable population had no choice but to admit carriers of the contagion. The results of this blunder were as brutal as they were predictable. As of last week, New York’s Health Department estimated the number of nursing home patients who had died of COVID-19 to be 3,500, a total representing more than 20 percent of all the state’s fatalities.

As reports of the suffering going on in nursing homes made clear, what happened was not a function of demography or chance. The March 25 order handed down by Cuomo’s Health Department mandating that nursing homes could not reject those recovering from the illness set in motion the events that inflated the state’s COVID-19 death tolls.

Far from realizing the mistake and seeking to correct it, Cuomo was still doubling down on the order at an April 26 press conference, at which he said again that nursing homes had no right to challenge the state order and reject patients who were likely to spread the illness. . .

Yet as the New York Post reported a day later, one coronavirus hotspot, the Cobble Hill Health Center in Brooklyn, where 55 people have died from COVID-19, had tried repeatedly to inform state Health Department officials of its lack of equipment and staff to handle the problem and received no help. Requests to transfer patients to the makeshift wards at New York’s mammoth Javits Center, a convention center that has been turned into a hospital, or the USS Comfort, the navy hospital ship that was anchored in New York Harbor before leaving due to lack of use, were turned down. (Read more from “Media Doesn’t Care That People Died Because Cuomo Put Coronavirus Patients in Nursing Homes” HERE)

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