I’ve got good news. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York has conducted a thorough investigation of himself and found that sticking COVID-19 postive patients back into nursing homes had nothing to do with the mass carnage in those facilities. It was, according to his report, “other factors” that lead to the thousands of deaths in his state that did not occur in places like Florida and Texas.

Nothing to see here.

Cuomo agency report: other factors, not Cuomo policy, to blame for nursing home deaths https://t.co/yRSBAo7Fk6

— The Buffalo News (@TheBuffaloNews) July 6, 2020

Well, that’s a relief.

LBANY – In a self-examination of one of the most controversial public health policy decisions during the Covid-19 pandemic in New York, the Cuomo administration says its policy requiring nursing homes to admit coronavirus positive patients was not a “significant factor” in the thousands of deaths seen at the facilities across the state.

The 33-page review released Monday by the state Health Department instead blamed Covid-19-positive staff and visitors who unknowingly infected the vulnerable population of nursing home patients, at least more than 6,000 of whom died in numbers that are not yet complete.

You got that? It wasn’t the large number of coronavirus infected older people forced back into these nursing homes that spread the virus. Rather, it was “visitors” and healthcare workers bringing the virus in that caused the massive total of deaths.

If that doesn’t make sense to you, that’s because it’s obviously nonsense. While it’s possible that some family members infected people, visitors were banned from these facilities weeks before Cuomo’s fateful order. The spread of the virus proliferated long after March 25th as well.

Further, per his own report, they have no data whatsoever to support the idea that visitors coming did this.

There was a “high likelihood” that Covid-19-positive visitors came to nursing homes, though the report said there is “no specific data to support this assumption and so, ultimately, this is inconclusive.” Cuomo shut down visitation at nursing homes March 13, two weeks after the first confirmed case was revealed in New York.

Meanwhile, the staff of these facilities were overworked, having patients sick with a deadly disease shoved back into their care without the proper equipment and training to treat them. That’s 100% on Cuomo, who chose to send those patients back into long term care facilities because he completely failed at managing his emergency hospital capacity, some of which went largely unused (the Javits Center is an example).

The report eventually tried to place most of the blame on healthcare workers in the nursing homes.

The report is more clear about what it called the main spreader of Covid-19 in nursing homes: employees. It said nursing home industry data estimated that about 37,500 facility staffers tested positive between March 19 and early June. Nearly 7,000 of those people were working at nursing homes in March at a time when testing was far from widespread or even urged in some quarters.

The report said that thousands of staffers “unknowingly” transmitted the virus in March – “through no fault of their own” – while at work at facilities upstate and downstate.

Where does Cuomo think those healthcare workers got the virus from in the first place? Logic would tell you that they likely got it from treating the already infected patients dropped in their laps by the governor. But logic isn’t being applied in this report, which is nothing but a desperate attempt to distract and blame shift by the worst governor in the country.

This entire thing is an absolute joke and an insult to the thousands of people who lost loved ones because of Cuomo’s actions. If say, Ron DeSantis had this disaster occur in his state and put out a self-investigative report like this, the media would absolutely destroy him. Heck, even as his state has fared better than most others, he’s still getting roasted on a daily basis while Cuomo’s praises are sung on networks like CNN and MSNBC.

It’s grotesque, and I don’t use that term lightly. Someone needs to be held accountable here and that person is Andrew Cuomo. Voters in New York shouldn’t forget this, though I suspect they will.