Gov. Cuomo on Capitol Hill to face House committee over COVID nursing home deaths

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is on Capitol Hill Tuesday to answer questions before a Congressional panel on the COVID deaths at nursing homes during his tenure.

His testimony will be behind closed doors before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

The Republican led committee issued a subpoena in March for Cuomo to be deposed.

Months before a blistering investigation found Cuomo sexually harassed 11 women in 2021, the same attorney general concluded that the administration understated the true death toll in nursing homes by thousands and that fatalities may have been fueled by a state order that effectively forced such homes to accept recovering COVID-19 patients.

Under the Cuomo administration, the state Health Department refused to make an expert available to the AP to explain its continued decision to publicize only the lower tally.

During the spring of 2020, when New York was the deadliest hot spot in the U.S., Cuomo emerged in the eyes of many Americans as a hero of the pandemic for his daily PowerPoint briefings and stern but reassuring language. He won an international Emmy and wrote a book on leadership in a crisis.

But Cuomo’s critics long charged that he was manipulating coronavirus statistics to burnish his image. Months later, it turned out that his administration had minimized the death toll among nursing home residents by excluding several thousand who had succumbed after being transferred to hospitals.

Cuomo used those lower numbers last year to erroneously claim that New York was seeing a much smaller percentage of nursing home residents dying of COVID-19 than other states.