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The state Health Department intentionally “misled the public” about the number of nursing home deaths from COVID-19 to help burnish former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s reputation before a sexual harassment scandal forced him to resign in disgrace, according to a blistering comptroller’s audit released Tuesday.
Auditors found that DOH officials undercounted the death toll by at least 4,100 residents and at times by more than 50 percent, allowing Cuomo to repeatedly and falsely claim that New York was doing a better job than other states in protecting highly vulnerable seniors, the report says.
“While the Department’s duty is to act solely to promote public health, we determined that, rather than providing accurate and reliable information during a public health emergency, the Department instead conformed its presentation to the Executive’s narrative, often presenting data in a manner that misled the public,” the report says.
In a prepared statement, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli called the audit findings “extremely troubling.”
“Families have a right to know if their loved one’s COVID-19 death was counted, but many still don’t have answers from the state Department of Health,” he said.
“The public was misled by those at the highest level of state government through distortion and suppression of the facts when New Yorkers deserved the truth.”
DiNapoli also accused the DOH of hindering his probe by delaying the production of data requested by his office, limiting auditors’ access to DOH staffers, not answering questions during meetings and not providing supporting documentation for its claims.
“These are not routine actions by state agencies undergoing an Office of the State Comptroller audit and raise serious concerns about the control environment at DOH,” his office said in a press release.
The 58-page audit says that the DOH “used alternating methodologies to account for nursing home deaths” during the pandemic and “consistently underreported the total number” until Feb. 4, 2021 — about a week after state Attorney General Letitia James issued a report that said the state’s official nursing home death toll may have been undercounted by as much as 50 percent.
In a prepared statement, James said that DiNapoli had confirmed “many of the findings that we uncovered last year about the state’s response to COVID, most notably that DOH and the former governor undercounted the number of deaths in nursing homes.”
“I am grateful to Comptroller DiNapoli for bringing much needed transparency to this critical issue,” she said.
“My office will continue to monitor nursing home conditions and ensure the safety of our most vulnerable residents.”
In the wake of James’ report, The Post exclusively revealed that top Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa was recorded secretly telling state Democratic lawmakers on Feb. 10, 2021 that his administration covered up the nursing home death toll due to a potential federal probe into the state’s response to the pandemic.
“Because then we were in a position where we weren’t sure if what we were going to give to the Department of Justice, or what we give to you guys, what we start saying, was going to be used against us while we weren’t sure if there was going to be an investigation,” she said.
Prior to the revelations, Cuomo, 64, was riding high on the popularity of his daily coronavirus briefings, for which he was awarded the International Emmys’ “Founders Award” during a livestreamed event featuring celebrities Robert DeNiro, Ben Stiller, Spike Lee, Rosie Perez, Billy Crystal and Billy Joel.
But the Feb. 24, 2021, publication of an online essay in which former state development official Lindsey Boylan accused him of sexual harassment led to an avalanche of accusations and a probe by James that concluded he’d harassed 11 women, including nine current or former state employees.
He resigned in August under threat of an all-but-certain impeachment, claiming that the scandal surrounding him was “politically motivated” but that he wanted to spare the state “months of political and legal controversy.”
Younger brother Chris Cuomo’s career as a CNN host also went down in flames when evidence released by James late last year revealed that he worked behind the scenes with his brother’s advisers amid the scandal and secretly tried to dig up dirt on at least one accuser.
Assemblyman Ron Kim (D-Queens), whose uncle died of suspected COVID-19 in a nursing home, said he was “very grateful” for DiNapoli’s “thorough audit that validates what many nursing home families knew already: The former governor suppressed and covered up life and death information that could have been used to save lives.”
“I believe this is criminal public fraud and I join the victims’ families in calling for full accountability,” he said.
Cuomo’s spokesman, Rich Azzopardi, tried to downplay and discredit the audit.
“As the number of out of facility deaths were reported last January this is not news, however what is peculiar is the Comptroller’s release of this audit now — but no one has ever accused him of being above politics,” Azzopardi said in an email.
The DOH didn’t immediately return a request for comment, but in a written response to a draft version of DiNapoli’s audit took issue with many of its conclusions.
The DOH said the auditors didn’t “take proper account of the various types of quantitative and qualitative information that Department personnel have used to assist in responding to the Covid-19 pandemic; the various practical trade-offs that exist between different types of infection and mortality data; or the affirmative efforts that Department personnel have made over the past several years to enhance both the scope and the reliability of the information collected from nursing homes to meet the challenges face in the ongoing pandemic.”
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