White House officials took aim at Gov. Cuomo Tuesday, slamming the governor over New York’s high number of coronavirus deaths in nursing homes.
“Governor Cuomo alone is to blame for refusing to shut down New York and forcing seniors who tested positive for coronavirus back into his state’s nursing homes,” White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said in a statement.
The comments come after Cuomo has spent the past few days doing an array of national media interviews and appearing on morning shows, touting New York’s progress during the pandemic and the state’s low infection rate.
Cuomo has repeatedly blamed the Trump administration for the high rate of nursing home deaths in the state and said New York was simply following guidelines regarding re-admittance set by the Centers for Disease Control.
“We followed federal guidance on the nursing homes,” Cuomo said earlier Tuesday during an interview on NBC’s “Today Show.”
“We had more people die than any other state. That’s a fact,” he said. “The reason that happened was because we had the virus coming from Europe when the federal government told us the virus was coming from China. And we had no screening on people coming from Europe.”
Over 4,300 Virus Patients Were Deliberately Sent To NY Nursing Homes
More than 4,300 recovering coronavirus patients were sent to New York’s already vulnerable nursing homes under a controversial state directive that was ultimately scrapped amid criticisms it was accelerating the nation’s deadliest outbreaks, according to a count by The Associated Press.
Nearly 25,000 New Yorkers have died from COVID-19, including roughly 6,000 nursing home residents.
The governor has fired shots at the federal response to the pandemic in recent days as other states see dramatic increases in coronavirus cases. New York’s infection rate has plummeted and hovered around 1% in recent days. Out of 48,709 tests performed Monday, the state recorded only 597 positive cases.
Blame Turned Back On Cuomo For Nursing Home Deaths
as U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-New York, and former Republican former New York Gov. George Pataki reminded him (Cuomo), the CDC clearly stated that the placement of patients should be based on the ability of the accepting facility to accept them and keep them safe, and if they were unable to do that they should not admit them. Cuomo had said the nursing homes must admit them.
Gidley defended President Trump, who has broken with public health experts as he casts doubt on the effectiveness of testing when it comes to controlling and tracking the virus, and ripped Cuomo despite New York’s gains.
“His reckless response did not follow CMS and CDC guidelines devastating the senior population-and no amount of revisionist history can erase Governor Cuomo’s grossly incompetent decisions or the fact that President Trump’s bold, aggressive actions saved millions of lives.”
Cuomo senior adviser Rich Azzopardi pushed back on Gidley’s criticisms, citing state and federal guidelines mandating nursing homes accept “only those residents for whom it can provide adequate care.”
“I know history shows that if you don’t bend to the president’s will, you’ll get fired, but enough with the lies,” he said. “More than a dozen other states adopted the same policies off the same guidelines — and yet the Washington republicans are hell-bent on politically targeting six Democratic states in an election year for them. No one’s dumb enough to fall for it.”
Twenty-seven people died due to the virus in New York on Monday, Cuomo said, an increase from 10 people a day earlier. At the height of the crisis, nearly 800 were dying a day in the Empire State.
The governor also shot down criticisms that he overreacted to the crisis, arguing that other states took less restrictive measures and are now facing major spikes.
“Look at the facts, look around the country. Everything says we did it right, and we did it smart,” he said. “Look, nobody wanted to close. No business person wanted to close, no employee wanted to stay home, but there was no alternative.
“And those states that had this blind, ‘OK, let’s do whatever we want to do and we’ll reopen immediately,’ they have serious problems now,” he added.
As other states continue to see record numbers, Cuomo again said he has not ruled out some form of a quarantine or isolation guidance for people entering New York from places like Texas and Florida.
___
(c)2020 New York Daily News
Visit New York Daily News at www.nydailynews.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
—-
This content is published through a licensing agreement with Acquire Media using its NewsEdge technology.
Recent Comments