Andrew Cuomo sued over pandemic order placing COVID-19 patients in nursing homes
Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is being sued over his pandemic order placing thousands of COVID-19 patients in nursing homes during the pandemic, which critics argue put thousands of elderly individuals at risk.
Daniel Arbeeny, whose 89-year-old father died in April 2020 after developing coronavirus symptoms while at a nursing home in Brooklyn, filed a class-action lawsuit Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.
The filing names Cuomo, top Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa and former New York State Commissioner of Health Howard A. Zucker as defendants.
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“This policy of mandatory admission, non-testing and comingling of nursing home residents constituted reckless endangerment by all of the Defendants,” the complaint reads, according to The New York Post.
Arbeeny told the outlet that his lawsuit is about holding those in charge accountable for the directive Cuomo issued in March 2020 requiring recovering COVID-19 patients to be transferred to nursing homes.
“Wrongful death is wrongful death, whether it’s the state or not," Arbeeny was quoted as saying. "It’s wrong. The government needs to make amends for this."
In June 2021, Arbeeny authored an opinion column with his brother Peter, writing that “thousands of grieving families who lost loved ones in nursing homes are seeking the truth about Cuomo’s ill-fated advisory and subsequent cover-up of the true death toll.”
“Common sense tells us that nursing homes are the absolute last place that any sensible elected leader should send COVID-positive patients,” wrote the Arbeeny brothers.
“The governor’s strategy was to make nursing homes the first and only place to send discharged COVID-19 positive hospital patients, and without PPE. This happened even though not one nursing home was properly equipped to handle COVID-19 patients in March of 2020.”
In March 2020 as pandemic lockdowns began, a Cuomo directed approximately 9,000 recovering COVID-19 patients to be transported to hundreds of nursing homes in New York. According to records obtained by The Associated Press, the 9,056 recovering patients sent to nursing homes were 40% higher than what the state health department had previously reported.
Cuomo aide DeRosa told state lawmakers in February 2021 that the administration had withheld data on the state’s nursing home death toll because they feared that the information would be “used against us” by federal prosecutors.
Two weeks earlier, New York Attorney General Letitia James published a report stating that the actual death toll of nursing home residents between March and August 2020 could have been twice as high as what the state had reported.
These revelations, combined with multiple allegations of sexual harassment leveled against Cuomo, led to him resigning as governor in August of last year.
Last month, the New York Office of the State Comptroller released an audit that found that Cuomo’s Health Department “misled the public” about the data on nursing home deaths and “was not transparent in its reporting of COVID-19 deaths at nursing homes.”
"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 states.
“Whether due to the poor-quality data that it was collecting initially or, later, a deliberate decision, for certain periods during the pandemic, the Department understated the number of deaths at nursing homes by as much as 50%,” the audit report added.
It was reported earlier this year that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office does not plan to prosecute Cuomo over the temporary COVID-19 nursing home order.
The lawsuit comes as a court in the United Kingdom ruled earlier this week that a government policy to discharge hospital patients to nursing homes in March and April 2020 without testing them for COVID-19 first was illegal because it failed to account for the risk it would pose to older and vulnerable individuals.
