Family of New York nursing home COVID victims slams Andrew Cuomo in House hearing

Meter

From Josh Christenson

May 17, 2023 | 1:36 pm

The daughter of an elderly woman who died of COVID-19 in a New York nursing home ripped off disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday for hiding his decision to transfer infected patients to aged care facilities to the ‘ beginning of the pandemic.

Vivian Zayas told lawmakers on the House Select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic that her mother, Ana Martinez, and thousands of others who were placed in nursing homes between March and May 2020 as a result of Cuomo’s directive were being treated like animals from zoos and died alone.

We never saw our beautiful mother again. She had died shortly after. Out of breath, lonely, confused and scared without her daughters who were her translators and caregivers, said Zayas, who later co-founded the COVID support group Voices for Seniors. My mother was unable to meet her grandchildren or great-grandchildren.

The Albanys Department of Health issued an order on March 25, 2020, forcing aged care facilities to accommodate COVID-positive patients discharged from hospitals.

The directive was quietly rescinded on May 10, 2020.

Like many other families, the nursing home also kept us in the dark, never telling us they were admitting COVID-positive patients at Governor Cuomo’s insistence, said Zayas, who noted that the former governor and other Democrats are are relieved of responsibility for that decision for more than 1,000 days.

After rescinding the order, Cuomo and his top advisers urged state health officials to cover the total number of nursing home deaths from COVID-19 excluding fatalities that occurred outside the facilities in a July 2020 report .

A year later, a senior adviser to Cuomo and a spokesperson for the state Department of Health admitted the governor had lied that only 6,432 deaths had occurred in nursing facilities.

As of March 2021, more than 15,000 New York nursing home residents have reportedly died from the virus, including in their own facilities and hospitals.

Governor Cuomo knew the mandatory admissions order was wreaking havoc in New York nursing homes. And so, his administration froze data on nursing home deaths in the state, subcommittee chair Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) said in his opening remarks.

Our initial requests to our local lawmakers requesting an investigation into factors that contributed to the deaths of our loved ones were met with roadblocks, vitriol and partisan charges, Zayas said. It has been extremely concerning since my mother [was] a Puerto Rican woman who along with most of our family has been a Democrat all her life.

Zaya’s mother was moved to an aged care facility after being briefly hospitalized with a minor cyst. She was expected to make a full recovery.

Other subcommittee witnesses panned Cuomo’s pandemic memoir American Crisis and his decision to publish it while the outbreak was ongoing after he received more than $5 million to write it.

He was concerned about his image and promoting a book in the middle of a pandemic not the end, where you can have more foresight in the middle of a pandemic, while my mother and all these old people were out of breath and dying alone, Zayas said.

The subcommittee also heard from Fox News meteorologist Janice Dean, who lost both of her in-laws to COVID while in a nursing home; Bill Hammond, senior fellow for health policy at the Empire Center, the think tank that revealed Cuomo’s directive has led to a glut of senior deaths from the virus; and Dr. David Grabowski, professor of health policy at Harvard Medical School.

“I didn’t think the book was accurate or well done,” Hammond told subcommittee members. And to the extent that people thought it was, I think they’ve been misled.

A March 2022 report from the New York State Department of Health found that Cuomo had misled the public and underreported deaths by more than 50 percent to try to salvage his image.

Cuomo stepped down in August 2021 following allegations of sexual harassment by several women during his tenure.