New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) praised himself for his handling of the state’s coronavirus response, quipping that Santa Claus will be “very good” to him this Christmas due to the hard work from his pompous leadership amid the pandemic.
“I’m going to have a great one. Santa is going to be very good to me, I can tell,” Cuomo said during his Monday virtual press briefing. “I worked hard this year.”
The New York Governor made this bizarre comment while imploring New Yorkers to “stop playing politics” to save lives in following the CDC health guidelines going into this holiday season.
“We have to get through the holiday season. I also want to say again to people, where everything is so political in this state, everything is so political in this country, everything is so polarized, Biden and Trump agree,” Cuomo said. “How are you playing politics with COVID when even Biden and Trump aren’t playing politics with COVID. And by the way, Biden and Trump haven’t agreed on anything. This is the one thing they agree on. So stop the politics and actually save lives.”
“You see those high infection rates, high positivity rates, high hospitalization rates, you know what they translate into? High death rates. And that is going to be inarguable. There’s going to be a time when people turn around and say, why did 57 people die? And why did we have more people die than anywhere else? You don’t want to have to answer that question, and the answer can’t be because we played politics,” he added.
Cuomo’s Santa will be “very good” remark was quickly met with a flood of criticism, scolding the Democrat governor’s narcissism in claiming to have worked hard during the pandemic.
Fox News meteorologist Janice Dean, who lost both in-laws earlier this year due to Cuomo’s nursing home mandate fired back at the governor for saying he “worked hard.”
Worked hard to help kill seniors, jobs and New York State in general?
— Janice Dean (@JaniceDean) December 21, 2020
“He definitely worked hard on his book deal, his Emmy award, and lying through his teeth all year,” Dean added in a follow-up tweet.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) rebuked the “worst Governor in America” for being “tone deaf.”
Worst Governor in America is also excruciatingly tone deaf 🙄🤭 https://t.co/sykENN33ZE
— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) December 21, 2020
The New York Governor became a liberal celebrity darling due to his sober daily press briefing addressing the state’s epidemic that he himself undeniably caused. But, despite having a high approval rating, Cuomo’s abysmal handling of the crisis caused by implementing his hard-working policy as a response directly resulted in countless lost lives and the destruction of a prosperous state.
From March through May, New York was the epicenter of the pandemic. Cuomo presided over a state having the highest COVID cases and deaths count during the first two months of the outbreak. In one month after delaying shuttering New York, there were nearly 350,000 COVID cases and more than 22,000 deaths, nearly a third of the nation’s total.
The cause? Cuomo delayed and refusal to act sooner, while sending mixed messages led to a besieged state and city. Medical experts stated Cuomo’s catastrophic missteps played a huge role, and “had New York imposed its extreme social distancing measures a week or two earlier, the death toll might have been cut by half or more.” Former CDC director Tom Frieden said, “so many deaths could have been prevented’ had New York issued its stay-at-home order just ‘days earlier’ than it did.”
Petty public feud with fellow New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio would play a huge role in Cuomo keeping New Yorker during those first critical three weeks in the dark. After an inexcusably slow start, Cuomo would finally grasp the severity of the pandemic, but it was already too late.
When he wasn’t placing blame for the delay on other, the governor would maintain his innocence to defend his botched response. Cuomo argued that the state was quick to respond, noting how he shut down nonessential businesses and ordered New Yorkers to stay at home as of the evening of March 22. However, that was three days after a stay-at-home order went into effect in California, a state with more than twice the population of New York but about a tenth of the confirmed deaths, and about a sixth of the cases.
His delayed response saw no acknowledgment of error, instead the Democrat governor had the audacity to proclaim at one point that “governors don’t do pandemics.” Newsflash Cuomo, under the 10th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, it gives states all powers not specifically given to the federal government, allows them the authority to take public health emergency actions, such as setting quarantines and business restrictions.
Instead of owning up to his mistake as a leader would normally do, Cuomo continued to place the blame on everyone but thee, including the media for not “blowing the bugle,” sooner, despite the fact over 450 articles from Jan 9 to March 1 reported on the novel coronavirus.
The worse part of his handling during the pandemic was not his botched excuse riddle delayed response, but his administration response regarding covid confirmed nursing home residents. Cuomo’s March 25 executive order states that “No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the [nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.”
Basically, the order was intended solely to free up the shortage of hospital bed space, forcing nursing homes to accept returning COVID hospitalized elderly patients while prohibited those to be tested for “prior to admission or readmission.” And sadly, the governor’s malfeasance order resulted in the horrific mass senicide due to his controversial nursing homes order that contributed to nearly a third of New York total COVID death count.
Cuomo has faced blistering criticism for its role in increasing deaths and infections in New York nursing homes, which house vulnerable population at high risk of the most serious symptoms and side effects of COVID-19. But despite causing the state’s nursing homes to became out-of-control COVID hotspots, New York’s Health Department declined to release its data. The Associated Press reported its own internal tally in May that found Cuomo reportedly ordered over 4,500 COVID elderly recovered patient were sent back to nursing homes. Shortly after the AP report, the controversial March 25 order from New York state’s website was quietly scrubbed off and replaced with an “updated guidance.”
A month later, New York state released its own numbers with the 33 page report finding the death count even higher than AP reported at around 6,300 based on a July audit. The report sought to casts the order as “suggesting the policy was not the cause,” with Cuomo declaring his March 25 directive was never intended to force nursing homes to take patients they weren’t equipped to care for, and that they should have spoken up if that was the case.
Despite the fact that many leading Democrats have clamored for an independent investigation, and mainstream news outlets like the Associated Press have agitated for data transparency, Cuomo continues to insist that calls are politically motivated and part of an “ugly politics” drummed up by his conservative media critics.
In another count tally conducted in August, the Associated Press reported that New York’s staggering nursing-home death toll might actually be a substantial undercount. Using data from the Kaiser Family Foundation, the AP estimated that if New York’s nursing-home death toll percentage were at the national average, the death toll would be 11,000.
So why is the governor “working hard” in preventing an independent or federal investigation to find out a full account of what happened. Insisting that his own administration’s Department of Health performed an investigation that reported the order wasn’t a “significant factor” should be, according to Cuomo the final conclusion reviewing the state’s nursing-home deaths. An investigation conducted internally by Cuomo’s own administration is worthless due to many science and health experts as well as elected officials scolding the report for its “flawed methodology and selective stats that sidestepped the actual impact” that never actually addressed the real effect caused by the order.
What made matters worse was the lies and denials coming out of Cuomo’s mouth that followed. In one local interviews, Cuomo denied that such event “just never happened,” asserting New York has the lowest numbers of nursing home deaths compared to other states and that’s how he sleeps well at night because he saved lives.
Delayed response, killing grannies, failure to take any responsibility and blaming others wasn’t all Cuomo did in “working hard” during the pandemic. The Democrat as a crisis manager would implement the most draconian lockdown restrictions that devastated small businesses, officially comatose a city once known for never sleeping.
New York now ranks 50th for its economic outlook. The city’s 13.2 percent unemployment rate is nearly twice the national average of 6.9 percent. Before mid-March, New York City’s economy boasted nearly 4.1 million private-economy jobs — a record. These jobs spanned corporate law, software design, finance, real estate, manufacturing, construction, health care, retail, and services.
As many as 25 percent of city eateries had already closed for good, from high-end Aureole and Gotham Bar & Grill to countless diners, bagel joints, and pizza parlors. In a new National Restaurant Association survey, 54 percent of New York state eateries don’t expect to survive the next six months without government help; the national average is 37 percent.
Bars and restaurants have struggled for months under Cuomo’s mandates. Indoor dining only resumed on Sept. 30 after a six-month shutdown, at just 25 percent capacity, while it’s been 50 percent capacity everywhere else in the state. The governor decided to make things even harder for businesses selling alcoholic beverages by enforcing a crackdown on establishments to require, whom many who don’t serve food, to sell a substantial “meal” along with the overpriced cocktail. To make sure those businesses are following his stringent rule, the “King” governor enforced a task force comprised of State Police to aggressively enforce his law.
What worse is what Cuomo did last month in imposing a 10 p.m. curfew on restaurants and gyms, or risk an onerous $10,000 fine. The virus is so smart, smarter than the governor and definitely knows how to tell time.
It’s 10p.m, do you know where COVID rages?
It wasn’t enough for the governor that as of last week, Cuomo imposed once again shutting down indoor dining, a major setback to New York City’s economic recovery and struggling restaurateurs that were operating on a 25 percent capacity and a 10 pm closure. His decision to pump the brakes on indoor dining contracts the state’s own contact tracing data that revealed restaurants and bars accounted for only 1.4% of the 46,000 Covid-19 cases recorded between September and November, while the vast majority of known exposures, 73.4% came from private household gatherings.
So in other words, Cuomo is flatly ignoring his own data after spending millions on contact tracing that identifies restaurants account for about 1 percent of positive cases in making his inexplicable decision. Yet, the New York Governor doesn’t give a damn about nailing the final nail in businesses coffin without any stimulus relief aid insight, putting even more New Yorkers out of work in a dismal economy just two weeks before Christmas. He is still content with his decision while collecting a paycheck that won’t expire this week.
Instead of an effective, science-based approach, Cuomo’s response has devolved into a politically driven, toxically narcissistic, tribalistic disaster. Cuomo should explain why, when thousands of health experts declared that lockdowns don’t work, they only put people out of work.
Not shocking, five of the six states with the lowest unemployment rates have the fewest COVID restrictions, while five of the highest unemployment rate, New York being number one have the most stringent lockdown and high covid cases number. Go figure.
And it appears there’s no end in stopping these hypocritical Democrats from imposing draconian shutdowns as we are now heading into possibly a new administration that favors governors in blue states rely on unconstitutional vast emergency powers indefinitely, all in the name of their baseless science data.
So what is Cuomo’s solution to fix the problems he has caused racking up the state deficit problem? “The federal government must provide relief to these bars and restaurants in this next package.”
Basically, leave one hand out panhandling to Congress for a bailout fund while using his other hand to impose orders forcing business to shutter. Republican Congressmembers refuse to make Cuomo dream a reality and now the Democrat is waiting for Joe Biden to ask again.
Despite his past decisions during the onset of the pandemic that has caused indefinite damage to million of New Yorker livelihoods, Cuomo continues to impose more problems than solutions, leading to a mass exodus of nearly 300,000 New Yorkers from March through November. And if these numbers hold up or continue to increase as the Census counts the state’s population, New York will lose a congressional seat and decrease in federal appropriation funds for the next decade.
It’s so bad under his leadership that Cuomo’s failure to governor has even forced his own ex-girlfriend, Sandra Lee to escape the concrete jungle.
The catastrophic effect of this slow response will not be forgiven or forgotten unless Cuomo can actually turn around the effects he has caused and bring New York back to the city that never sleeps. Until then, nothing he now says will bring comfort to our grieving city.
CoronavirusGov. Andrew CuomoNew YorkNew York CityNew York NewsPress BriefingSanta Claus
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