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Gov. Andrew Cuomo again justified his administration’s decision to stop counting COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes of residents who died after being transferred to hospitals, but ultimately admitted at least one mistake he made during the coronavirus crisis.
“I was the first state in the country to make masks, I should have done it sooner. I should have done masks earlier. It would have made a dramatic difference, ”Cuomo told WAMC radio.
The three-term Democratic governor issued a statewide mask order on April 15 – 45 days after New York City had its first confirmed coronavirus case and during a period when the state was suffering more than 600 deaths related to the virus per day.
Cuomo also admitted that “we were wrong” to say that asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19 cannot spread the killer virus.
“It was just not true,” the governor said, adding, “We spent months saying you should sneeze or cough. It was simply wrong.
Cuomo said he has now done his own research and that articles in a medical journal from January and February showed there was evidence of asymptomatic spread.
But, Cuomo said, “It’s not really a state function, it’s really a federal function … with the CDC. [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]. “
“Most of these issues are not under state control, are they. They’re mostly federal because it’s a global pandemic issue, ”he said.
There was a “litany” of mistakes made, according to Cuomo as he explained, “We were slow to find the virus here. We were wrong when we said it was asymptomatic, we were wrong when we said you cannot be re-infected. The collective – we made many mistakes.
Meanwhile, Cuomo doubled down on his health department’s decision in early May to omit nursing home resident deaths in hospitals from the official nursing home death tally, which is now at minus 6400.
“The question is when a person goes from a nursing home to a hospital and dies in the hospital which is now called a hospital death,” Cuomo said.
Cuomo added, “Some people say, ‘No, that should be counted as a death in a nursing home’ – well, you have to reduce the number of hospital deaths and you attribute a death to a nursing home. nursing while it did not occur in a nursing home. nursing home, it happened in a hospital.
The governor continued: “If I am an operator of a retirement home, I would say: don’t say that people died in my retirement home because they didn’t, they died in the hospital. And if the hospital had done a better job, they wouldn’t have died. So why am I blamed for the death when it didn’t happen in my nursing home? “
Cuomo said it “depends on how you want to defend him.”
“If you die in a nursing home, it is called a death in a nursing home. If you died in a hospital, it’s called a hospital death, ”said Cuomo, who said the state runs the risk of“ doubling ”deaths if they’re not counted that way. .
The Cuomo administration declined to disclose the number of nursing home residents transferred to hospitals and died there, raising questions about the state’s official tally of COVID-19 nursing home deaths .
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