Cuomo’s deadly nursing home error

Maybe we should stop pretending Andrew Cuomo is America’s WuFlu Superhero.

Patriot Retort

You know, if President Trump had ordered nursing home residents who tested positive for Wuhan virus to return to their nursing homes instead of remaining in the hospital, the news media would be accusing him of murder and howling about how he has “blood on his hands.”

I mean, more than they already do.

But Governor Andrew Cuomo is the media’s hero – the light-bringer in our troubled times.

So the fact that Cuomo’s health department made such a fatal error is getting little pushback in the national press.

Sure, the New York papers have been covering the horrifying death toll in New York nursing homes.  But the national news media doesn’t give a crap because Orange Man Bad/Italian Man Good.

As Julie Kelly pointed out at American Greatness yesterday:

It should have been fairly simple for even the simpletons populating state and federal government to figure out that fragile, ill people trapped in close quarters would be the most susceptible to contracting the novel coronavirus. After all, the first known outbreak in the United States occurred in a nursing home in Washington state in late February. The virus spread quickly; at least 35 people died.

But “experts” were caught flat-footed. As they forced healthy children out of school and hounded joggers off public beaches, power-grabbing politicians secretly moved ailing seniors from hospitals to nursing homes—with fatal consequences.

And nowhere, of course, has the practice had a more deadly consequence than in New York. After failing to prepare his state and the nation’s largest city adequately for the expected outbreak, Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a directive in late March ordering nursing home operators to readmit hospitalized residents.

Those of us who want these state lockdowns to end are getting a heaping dose of histrionics about “You people want to kill grandma!!!” But thanks to Governor Cuomo, it is New York itself that’s killing grandma — while also killing New York’s economy.

From Kelly’s column:

For weeks, the crisis at New York nursing homes rapidly unfolded but pleas for help fell on deaf ears in Albany. The New York Post reported last week that an executive for a Brooklyn facility overrun with sick residents begged the Health Department to allow him to send suspected COVID-19 residents to the empty U.S. naval ship docked outside of the city.

Naturally, when confronted with this catastrophic blunder, the Great Hero Cuomo quickly deflected blame to the nursing homes themselves.

It’s not his job to make sure infected patients aren’t placed among those most vulnerable to infection. No siree. Now here’s some personal protective equipment and leave Hero Andrew alone so he can preen before the press and joke around with little brother Chris.

There’s just one problem with Cuomo’s self-absolving BS.

As Julie Kelly points out in her column, it was New York’s Health Department that expressly stated that no nursing home resident be barred from readmittance once the hospital deemed them “medically stable.”

By the way, “medically stable” does not mean “recovered from the virus.”

In other words, they still suffer from the Wuhan virus, and therefore are still infectious, but they are no longer in critical condition, so you gotta take ‘em nursing homes!  And it’s your job to make sure they don’t infect anyone else.

Talk about playing Russian roulette with the lives of elderly New Yorkers.

Last Wednesday, in its article about Cuomo absolving himself for this nursing home blunder, the New York Post highlighted something the slimeball said back in late March:

“Those are the people who are going to be vulnerable to the mortality of this disease,” Cuomo said on March 24. “It’s lives, it’s grandmothers and grandfathers and sisters and brothers.”

Sounds caring, no? Then again, Cuomo is good at sounding like a caring, well-meaning leader.

“It’s not my job,” on the other hand, is the real Andrew Cuomo — a callous, indifferent prick who leaves disaster in his wake while pointing the finger of blame at others.

As of April 21st, at least 3,505 New York nursing home residents have died from the Wuhan virus.  That’s nearly twice the number of California’s total death toll from COVID-19.

But as Julie Kelly explains in detail, this deadly nursing home error is not limited to New York State; it is a nationwide tragedy.

We locked down our entire country and are committing economic suicide ostensibly to protect the vulnerable only to have state governments leave the vulnerable at risk.