During times of crisis, it’s easy for politicians to shift blame. But the blame becomes criminal when thousands of citizens die from poor decision-making at the top.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s decision to send several thousand coronavirus-infected patients into nursing homes this past March had deadly consequences. The initial order was “so flawed that it even blocked the facilities from asking if those being transferred had tested positive for the virus,” writes Michael Goodwin at the New York Post.

Goodwin adds, “Many if not most of the staffs in nursing homes had insufficient or inferior protective gear, which is almost certainly why many of the workers became infected.” Realizing he’d made a disastrous and deadly mistake, the governor and the state’s health commissioner, Dr. Howard Zucker, rescinded the order in May.

But the damage was done. More than 6,000 New Yorkers were dead.

Now, desperate to deflect attention away from his own culpability, Cuomo did what leftist politicians do these days to hide their own incompetence: He blamed President Trump.

According to Cuomo, the Trump administration and the Centers for Disease Control failed to discover that the virus was coming from Europe instead of China. Apparently, Cuomo wants us to believe that these travelers infected nursing home patients in New York.

Sure, that makes sense. Except it doesn’t. What it does is make Cuomo look cold and heartless. Even Politico concluded that Cuomo’s basis for blaming the president was “mostly false.”

And just when we thought Cuomo couldn’t stoop any lower, he did. He’s also blaming the families of the nursing-home patients and the nurses who cared for them.

All this emerged from an investigation that, unsurprisingly, absolves Cuomo and his administration from any wrongdoing. K. Walker and Jeff Dunetz write at lidblog.com that “Governor Cuomo’s internal investigation into what caused the deaths in nursing homes has found that his March edict to force nursing homes to admit COVID-positive patients was not the cause of the 6,300 deaths.”

They add, “The Cuomo administration is now saying that asymptomatic healthcare workers are to blame.” Yet we still don’t have concrete evidence that asymptomatic carriers even spread the virus. Cuomo’s staff are simply trying to cover up the greatest tragedy to come out of the pandemic.

Cuomo has rejected his critics as conspiracy theorists and accused them of playing politics, but even the union representing nursing homes in New York has acknowledged serious flaws in the governor’s preparedness and response.

According to The Buffalo News, “George Gresham, president of 1199SEIU, which represents 40,000 nursing home staffers, said nursing home caregivers performed their tasks at physical and emotional cost and were often without adequate personal protective equipment and while being denied needed sick time.”

For now, Cuomo has paid no price for his lethal decision earlier this spring, although the Democrat-controlled legislature is considering hearings on the matter.

Let’s hope Governor Cuomo will ultimately be held accountable. It certainly won’t bring back those 6,000 souls, but history demands that we set the record straight.

(Visit our comprehensive CV19 Pandemic response and recovery page to review our timeline of government and political actions related to the pandemic, and see our related pages.