Gov. Cuomo’s Nursing Home Fiasco
Perhaps one of the deadliest mistakes made by government officials (predominantly those in New York State) during the pandemic was requiring re-admission of Covid-positive patients back into nursing homes.
On March 25, 2020, then-New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an “advisory” prohibiting nursing homes from “den[ying] re-admission or admission to the NH [nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of Covid-19.” The advisory was justified on the basis that New York had “an urgent need to expand hospital capacity in New York State to be able to meet the demand for patients with Covid-19 requiring acute care.” It was never explained how people with a “confirmed” diagnosis of Covid would receive acute care in nursing homes which are defined under New York’s own statutes as “facilit[ies] providing … nursing [rather than acute] care.” Governor Cuomo claimed that the order followed CDC guidance—a claim that even sympathetic fact-checkers rated as “mostly false.”
Unsurprisingly, these disastrous policies led to excess deaths. After all, the nursing home population is, by definition, older, sicker, frailer, and more susceptible to infection than the population at large. On top of that, nursing homes are fairly confined environments where any easily transmissible pathogen can spread faster and easier than, for example, at a school. While schools may also be “close quarters,” at least students are not especially susceptible, nor in the building 24/7. In contrast, nursing-home patients are confined to the facility around the clock. The nursing-home mandate was particularly galling and irresponsible since, at the very same time, New York public schools were ordered to close their doors. (The schools did not fully reopen until a year later).
Given basic knowledge of the general health status of the nursing home population, and the understanding that Covid was easily transmissible (the “social distancing” requirements, as unscientific as they may have been, were predicated on this very understanding), it is hard to excuse the nursing-home mandate as a mistake made by well-meaning people operating with imperfect information. But even if one could somehow excuse the initial error, as is often true, the cover-up was worse than the disease.
Fairly early on, New York officials knew that the policy was literally killing thousands of nursing-home residents. Yet, Governor Cuomo insisted that anyone pointing out the mandate’s folly was engaging in political gamesmanship. Making matters worse, his administration actively hid data from federal authorities, for fear that it would be used in a fraud investigation, or that it might help President Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign. Thus, lives and knowledge were sacrificed on the altar of electoral politics. A later investigation by New York’s Attorney General—a Democrat, like Governor Cuomo—found that the Cuomo Administration underreported nursing home deaths by as much as 83%.
The nursing-home mandate was thus another instance of “good intentions” substituting for common sense, and self-righteousness for accountability. It was yet another instance of the government imposing a mandate without concern as to how that mandate would affect the most vulnerable. (The same was true with school shutdowns, park closures, cancellation of surgeries, and the like).
The whole episode brings to mind Milton Friedman’s famous warning that “one of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” And though the peak of the Covid epidemic is now very much in the rear-view mirror, it would behoove us to remember that many of the people (including Andrew Cuomo) have never faced any accounting for their abominable choices. We should remember their 2020-era hubris and think twice before entrusting them with public service again.
April 18, 2025