Fox News’ Lawrence Jones pressed Independent New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo on Tuesday to simply apologize for the nursing home deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic while he was governor.
An audit from March 2022 revealed that the New York State Department of Health severely undercounted the deaths of patients in nursing homes by excluding those who died after being transported to the hospital. Cuomo stated on “Fox & Friends” that his administration followed all of the rules regarding its handling of the nursing homes, causing pushback from Jones.
“And on the COVID situation, there have been numerous investigations of that. We’ve gone all through it. We followed all the federal rules. We did nothing wrong. Of course, we lost 80,000 people. The nation lost 1.2 million people. It was horrific. It was horrific.” Cuomo said.
“Just say I’m sorry, governor. Why not just tell those victims’ families, look, it was a pandemic. We were going through a tough time. I was learning on the job certain things. But I’m sorry you lost your loved one. That would help a lot for a lot of those people,” Jones said.
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Cuomo stated that he had apologized, but then added that he simply followed federal guidance.
“I have said exactly that. New York had it first and worst. Nobody knew what we were dealing with. I had the best health experts from around the globe giving us advice. We followed the best advice. We followed the federal guidance. And people died in a horrific way. There were no visitors allowed into nursing homes. And I apologize for any family that lost a loved one during that time,” Cuomo continued.
While governor, Cuomo ordered nursing homes to accept patients recovering from COVID-19, prompting approximately 15,000 nursing home residents to die from COVID during the early part of the pandemic. The administration reported that around 6,000 patients died in July 2020.
In January 2021, a report from Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James found that the nursing home death count was undercounted by as much as 50%.
Despite this data, Cuomo refused to directly answer whether he would acknowledge the accurate number of nursing home deaths during a mayoral debate in June. He also denied that he lied to Congress about the death count.
“No, I told Congress the truth,” Cuomo said. “No, we did not undercount any deaths when they are all counted. We’re number 38 out of 50. Which I think shows that compared to what other states went through, we had it first and worst, and that only 12 states had a lower rate of death.”
The Department of Justice (DOJ) opened a criminal investigation in May into whether Cuomo lied to Congress during a probe into the nursing home deaths.
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