New York Democrats call for outside investigation of Andrew Cuomo’s COVID-19 nursing home Executive Order

  The man whom some Democrats thought might be a suitable replacement for Joe Biden at a brokered convention because of his handling of COVID-19 in his State is now embroiled in a burgeoning scandal because of his handling of COVID-19 in his State.

  Of course I am talking about Andrew Cuomo, the man the media has held up as the example of how Donald Trump should have responded to the COVID-19 outbreak. In case you do not know, and if you watch the mainstream media you probably do not know, Andrew Cuomo signed an Executive Order in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak which prevented nursing homes from testing people returning or being admitted to nursing homes from hospitals to be tested for COVID-19 before they were admitted to the homes.

  Seniors are among the most vulnerable and they are a high risk group for COVID-19 so this decision made no sense, naturally COVID-19 spread throughout the nursing homes and to date 5,300 nursing home residents have died of the virus in New York.

  Now there is growing outcry from New York Republicans and Democrats for an outside investigation into what went wrong. Here is more:

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo finds himself engulfed in scandal as a growing number of Democrats join state Republicans in demanding an independent investigation into his controversial policies and how questionable actions may might have contributed to the catastrophic outbreak of coronavirus in New York nursing homes.

More details have emerged in recent days raising major questions about potentially fatal decisions made under Cuomo’s watch as the death toll in New York’s nursing homes swells to over 5300 and continues to climb.

Last week, New York suddenly disclosed more than 1,700 previously unreported deaths at nursing homes and adult care facilities. An Associate Press tally put the number of nursing home virus deaths at over 5300.  Elderly care fatalities in New York have reportedly been on the rise by an average of 20 to 25 deaths per day for several weeks.

“It’s fine to have the Health Department and the attorney general looking at what individual nursing homes are doing. But there needs to be a professional review of not only the industry as a whole but what the Department of Health has been doing, both leading up to this situation and in the midst of this situation,” said New York Assemblyman Richard Gottfried, a Democrat. “Certainly, it would be wrong for the Department of Health to be charged with examining itself.”

“The attorney general should bring in outside counsel,” said Gottfried.

State Sen. Gustavo Rivera, a Democrat from the Bronx, said the State Legislature should investigate.

“I strongly believe that the Legislature is one of the key entities that should look into this issue, which has devastated so many families across our state,” said Rivera, chairman of the Senate Health Committee. “It is imperative to hold public hearings as soon as possible to get to the bottom of what truly happened at our state’s nursing homes as the COVID-19 pandemic developed.”

    You would think that in the middle of a pandemic where senior citizens are the highest risk group that you would test people before they are allowed to be admitted into a nursing home, but not only did Andrew Cuomo stop nursing homes from providing this potentially life-saving test he also shielded the nursing home from lawsuits which might arise in the wake of his deadly Executive Order. He had to have known how dangerous this order would turn out to be and he issued it anyway because he had no idea what to do.  

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium