The hubris and arrogance of Cuomo's statement is unbelievable.

Andrew Cuomo's deadly failures

On March 30, as COVID-19 cases and deaths piled up across the Empire State, and the USS Comfort arrived to calm a broken city, Gov. Andrew Cuomo called New York the “canary in the coal mine” of the U.S. coronavirus crisis. “What you see us going through here, you will see happening all across this country.”

Except it didn’t.

Instead, New York racked up massive coronavirus deaths, as the governor’s policies (as well as those of Mayor Bill de Blasio) left New Yorkers exposed. The rest of the country suffered losses, but nowhere near the intensely high number reached by New York.

The story of Cuomo’s role in the pandemic has been massaged by the media. And, indeed, Cuomo’s “just the facts” press conferences were initially soothing at a time of confusion and disarray. His Powerpoint presentations, blessedly boring during a tumultuous time, often began with what day it was, a feature appreciated by people in a seemingly permanent Groundhog Day in their homes. One of the slides invariably included raw numbers of how many had been diagnosed, how many were in the hospital, and how many had died. But as the smoke began to clear, it’s become increasingly obvious that the governor’s bad decisions, petty rivalries, and general incompetence caused much of the destruction in the first place.

The major story of the coronavirus epidemic in New York is how the governor’s policies toward long-term care facilities enabled the virus to run rampant among our most vulnerable population. In late April, it came to light that the previous month, the state ordered long-term care facilities to readmit residents who had been treated for the coronavirus. New residents who were “medically stable” were to be admitted as well. Thus did Cuomo’s New York guarantee that the most vulnerable population would be widely exposed to COVID-19 in environments that enabled its quick and deadly spread.

The official tally has about 20% of New York coronavirus deaths attributed to nursing homes, but we actually can’t be certain of how many people died because of this negligence. If someone from one of these mass-infected nursing homes died in a hospital, it’s not counted as a nursing home death. There’s also evidence that many of those who died at nursing homes weren’t tested for COVID-19, so the official statistic remains a question mark, but it’s almost certainly higher, perhaps much higher, than the state admits.
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He also shrugs off blame and argues that “nobody” should be held accountable for the nursing home deaths: “How do we get justice for those families? Who can we prosecute for those deaths? Nobody. Mother Nature, God, where did this virus come from? People are going to die by this virus. That is the truth.”

During Cuomo’s April 23 press conference, the governor was defiant about his mandate, saying: “[The nursing homes] don’t have a right to object. That is the rule and that is the regulation, and they have to comply with that. If they can’t do it, we’ll put them in a facility that can do it.” It was a crass death sentence for countless New Yorkers. The nursing homes, understaffed and with minimal personal protective equipment, didn’t stand a chance. During his May 18 press conference, Cuomo was asked about the elder-care experts’ claims that even before COVID-19, New York state had one of the lowest levels of care in nursing homes and lax health enforcement. Does the state deserve some blame? Cuomo completely dismissed the question.

Cuomo has given nursing homes immunity from prosecution for not providing staff and patients with PPE which caused people to get infected. How is this possible? You would be surprised at how congress has lowered the standards of treatment for nursing homes because of course their lobbyists.

But of course there is more. Of course there is.

On March 17, de Blasio told New Yorkers to prepare to “shelter in place,” an order to stay home except for essential needs, similar to what had been implemented in northern California. That night, Cuomo smacked that down as impossible before implementing essentially the same guidelines in his PAUSE order three days later.

On April 2, de Blasio announced a new recommendation to wear masks in public. At a press conference the next day, Cuomo questioned the need for them before reversing himself less than two weeks later.

On April 11, the mayor announced that schools would remain closed for the rest of the school year. The governor was quick to jump in and say no decision had been made, arrogantly saying of de Blasio: “He didn’t close them, and he can’t open them.” On May 1, Cuomo was forced to concede the schools are indeed staying closed.

When Cuomo announced New York beaches were allowed to open, de Blasio quickly said New York City’s shores would not. The whole point of this kind of coordination was so no state opens ahead of another one and causes people to travel for goods and services. With New York City beaches not allowing swimming, New Jersey, Long Island, and Connecticut beaches braced for a wave of New Yorkers, with some beaches changing their rules to allow only their own residents onto their beaches.
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The rivalry is also obvious in Cuomo’s limited consideration of New York City. On May 7, New York City finally suspended 24-hour subway service to disinfect train cars overnight. The fact that the trains, which fall under the governor’s purview, weren’t already being cleaned and disinfected, months into the pandemic, was shocking. As of May 1, 98 Metropolitan Transportation Authority workers had died from the coronavirus, more than any other state or city agency. A March 6 memo to MTA employees addressed the question of masks, noting, “Masks are not medically necessary as a protection against COVID-I9, and not part of the authorized uniform. They should not be worn by employees during work hours.” An outcry forced the MTA to permit transit employees to wear their own masks a week later. It would be weeks before the MTA would give out masks to its workers. Following in the governor’s footsteps, MTA Chairman Pat Foye blames the CDC and the World Health Organization for their directives saying masks are unnecessary. But there’s a vast gulf between saying that masks aren’t needed and prohibiting employees from wearing them. In Cuomo’s New York, no one takes any blame, and the buck doesn’t stop with the governor.

I bet you are thinking that the media will hold him accountable for his actions right? Think again. They have been covering his daily press conferences and some have gone as far as propping him up to replace Biden as presidential nominee if Biden continues to fail.

All of this has gone largely ignored by the media. They need a neat narrative and have widely decided that Cuomo is the hero, while DeSantis is the villain. But by all indications, DeSantis has done a far better job.

His shtick with his brother, who famously broke quarantine while actually sick with COVID-19, is one of the more noxious examples of the media’s complacency when covering the New York governor. Obviously, the governor’s brother lobs him softballs, if that, but other media outlets don’t do much better.

Cuomo is a gaffe machine, but the press are uninterested. He has blamed the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, “experts,” and others for how hard COVID-19 has hit his state. “Where were all the experts? Where was the New York Times, where was the Wall Street Journal, where was all the bugle blowers who should say, ‘Be careful, there’s a virus in China that may be in the United States?’ That was in November, December.” New York Times Metro Editor Jorge Arangure responded on Twitter: “From Jan. 9 to March 1, the date the NY state government finally took the coronavirus threat seriously, the New York Times had more than 450 stories about the coronavirus.”

52% of people have said that they won’t be able to pay their mortgages or rent next month. Surely congress will get off their asses and get help to us to keep the economy from tanking any further right? Ha...of course not.

This is going to go on and on and on, made worse by the fact that the Federal Reserve and Congress have chosen to bail out the rich and give peanuts to everyone else. Riots and protests will continue, because why not? People don’t have enough money, are going to lose their housing, the jobs to go back to don’t exist. Provocations which before were barely tolerable now set off firestorms.

The rich don’t care: they were scared at first, because a lot of them got infected in the first wave. Rich people have a lot of social contacts and travel a lot, BUT now that they know there’s a problem, they can self-isolate and protect themselves, and if they do get sick they receive the best care. Most poor people can’t self-isolate: they live in group housing, their jobs are often physical and usually put them around other people.

So there’s little incentive for Covid-19 to be handled properly: the rich are fine and pretty much safe, they just have to stay home a lot, in their big houses and multi-bedroom condominiums. They’re fine financially. What happens to other Americans is of little concern to them, so why not make them go back to work?

Something like a quarter to a third of small businesses are likely to be destroyed by this crisis. Whatever’s worth buying will be bought up for cents on the dollar by the rich, and they’ll consolidate further control over US real-estate.

Crises are good if you have cash money, and the rich are salivating. Let this drag out, let them take further advantage.
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Understand that this is a chosen fiasco. All that was required was reasonable subsidies, a moratorium on rent, mortgage and other loan payments, track and trace, mandatory masks and shelter in place orders.

Once your lords and masters realized they were mostly safe, they stopped caring about the crisis. Some states dealt with it acceptably, but on a national level, this is a totally forseeable, and thus essentially planned clusterfuck.

It’s you, or your elites. Until you remove them from power, by whatever means necessary, they will kill you and let you die whenever it is convenient to them, or just inconvenient to keep you around. (You may have thought it was only brown foreigners like Iraqis they were willing to kill hundreds of thousands of. Wrong.)

h/t joe shikspack

It’s obvious that rich people don’t give a rat’s ass about us and that includes congress because they are also filthy rich after decades of insider trading and getting rewarded by their donors. Gawd help us all because things are going to get ugly. Fast.