‘They came to work and they brought in the infection…’
(Claire Russel, Liberty Headlines) More than 40% of all COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. are connected to nursing homes, according to a report by the New York Times.
This connection is particularly bad in New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo passed a policy several months ago forcing nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients, thereby infecting dozens of others.
Cuomo has continued to deflect blame when confronted about his disastrous policy, and he did so again this weekend.
“I’ve taken political heat, OK. There’s facts and then there’s politics,” Cuomo told NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday when asked if senior centers are safe.
Cuomo has also blamed nursing home staff members who “got infected and brought it in.”
“You look at the communities that had the high infection rate overall — those were the communities that had a high infection rate — so it is that the staff got infected. They came to work and they brought in the infection,” Cuomo told MSNBC last week.
Cuomo then insisted that New York’s nursing homes are “safe,” despite the fact that more than 6,000 senior residents have died in his state’s long-term care facilities.
WATCH: Gov. Andrew Cuomo says nursing homes are “safer than senior citizens at home.” #MTP #IfItsSunday@NYGovCuomo: “If you are at home and you have an aide coming in, that aide is not tested. In a nursing home, the staff is being tested once a week.” pic.twitter.com/KAx4nU7Z5p
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) June 28, 2020
Even the Democrats in his own state have publicly disagreed with Cuomo’s assessment of the situation.
State Sen. Liz Krueger, D-Manhattan, admitted to the New York Post that the state government has not received a “full and correct accounting of how many people died of COVID-19 in nursing homes and how many nursing residents transferred to hospitals died of COVID.”