#Gov. Cuomo regrets not mandating masks for New Yorkers sooner

Gov. Andrew Cuomo again justified his administration’s decision to stop counting as nursing home deaths the COVID-19 fatalities of residents who succumbed after being transferred to hospitals, but finally admitted at least one mistake he made during the coronavirus crisis.

“I was the first state in the nation to do masks, I should’ve done it earlier. I should’ve done masks earlier. That would’ve made a dramatic difference,” Cuomo told WAMC radio.

The three-term Democratic governor issued a statewide mask order on April 15 — 45 days after New York had its first confirmed coronavirus case and during a period when the state was experiencing more than 600 virus-related deaths a day.

Cuomo also admitted “we were wrong” to say that asymptomatic carriers of COVID-19 can’t spread the killer bug.

“That was just wrong,” the governor said, adding, “We spent months saying you have to be sneezed or coughed on. That was just wrong.”

Cuomo said he has now done his own research and that articles in a medical journal dating back to January and February showed there was evidence of asymptomatic spread.

But, said Cuomo, “that’s not really a state function, that’s really a federal function…with the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].”

“Most of these issues are not in control of the state, right. They mostly are federal cause this is a global pandemic issue,” he said.

There was a “whole litany” of errors made, according to Cuomo as he explained, “We were late in finding the virus here. We were wrong when we said it was asymptomatic, we were wrong when we said you can’t get re-infected. The collective — we made many mistakes.”

Meanwhile, Cuomo doubled down on his Health Department’s decision in early May to leave out the deaths of nursing home residents in hospitals in the official tally of nursing home deaths, which is now at least 6,400.

“The question is when a person goes from a nursing home to a hospital, and the person dies in the hospital that is now called a hospital death,” Cuomo said.

Cuomo added, “Some people say, ‘No, that should be counted as a nursing home death’ — well then you would have to reduce the hospital deaths and you are attributing a death to a nursing home when it didn’t occur in a nursing home, it occurred in a hospital.”

The governor continued, “If I’m a nursing home operator, I would say: don’t say that people died in my nursing home because they didn’t, they died in the hospital. And if the hospital did a better job, they wouldn’t have died. So why do I get blamed for the death when it didn’t happen in my nursing home?”

Cuomo said that it just “depends how you want to argue it.”

“If you died in a nursing home, it’s called a nursing home death. If you died in a hospital, it’s called a hospital death,” said Cuomo, who claimed that the state runs the risk of “double” counting deaths if they are not tallied that way.

The Cuomo administration has refused to divulge the number of how many nursing home residents were transferred to hospitals and died there, raising questions regarding the state’s official tally on COVID-19-related nursing home deaths.