I Worked In A NY Nursing Home During Covid-19. The Sexual Misconduct Allegations Should Be The Least Of Cuomo’s Worries.
By Mel Gutstein
The news reports began slowly. There were a couple of random blurbs about something called a “Novel Coronavirus” emerging in the Wuhan Province of China, and that many people may have been infected with it. As it goes with much of the sensationalized news about possible pandemics, it was regarded with suspicion. It feels like nearly every year there is some new “Black Plague” that is going to usher in a new dark age, bringing about the end of the world as we know it. So we all continued about our days, maybe making a joke about it here or there in the nursing home. As the reports began to intensify about what had been happening in China, people began to get nervous, wondering if this disease might actually touch down in the U.S.
The first time I had heard of a lockdown, I was driving home from work and a couple of people on the radio were discussing the possibility of it happening in New York City. He said that they had been doing so in cities across China and that it could potentially hit mainland Europe or the United States in the next couple of months. Like much of the world, I laughed it off. There was no way that the largest city in America, and its cultural and financial hub, would ever be locked down. The thought of times square empty, or shuttered restaurants or bars was something out of the movie “Contagion”, and would certainly not happen in my lifetime.
As more and more information began to come in, two things became abundantly clear. 1. This disease was incredibly contagious and was probably already in the United States. 2. It was particularly deadly to the elderly and to the immunocompromised, the two populations that we worked with daily. Starting around January time (looking back on it) we started to see an increase in daily deaths in the facility, up significantly from prior years. People were getting scared, and morale in the facility was low.
After the first case of Novel Coronavirus (by then called Covid-19) touched down in New York, the facility administrator called an emergency meeting of all staff members. People sat quietly, fidgeting nervously as the facility director said that out of “abundance of caution, we will be closing the ventilator units to all visitors, and that staff members must be screened for fever before entering”. I recall seeing several of the nursing staff coughing and sneezing. Presumably many had already been infected, but testing was not widely available and we had yet to confirm our first case. It was all incredibly surreal, and when the mask mandates in the facility began, it had finally sunk in. We were going to see a lot of the residents of our facility die. These were people we all knew very well and would see daily. We knew their children, their grandchildren. But we were essentially powerless to stop it. With little to no direction from state officials, and zero government assistance we watched as we lost hundreds of residents. The hospitals became the primary focus, with Andrew Cuomo appearing daily on his Emmy award-winning, narcissistic, self-serving T.V. show, to talk about the job the “heroes were doing in these hospitals” and about how “God didn’t save NY, we did”. Little interest was paid to the not so sexy reality of nursing homes, filled with rotting bodies (They had taken to wrapping the bodies in plastic to contain infections) and staffed by poorly trained, and underpaid older Haitian women. It was strange being in a facility and seeing the complete disconnect between the reality of how the outbreak was being handled, and how the media chose to report it. The governor was being treated as a messianic figure and was now the savior of New York, but on the ground, we were still not receiving any aid and were being forced to take infected patients.
As Governor Cuomo told nursing homes to “do their jobs” many in the facilities began to wonder if the Governor was doing his. Our requests for test and PPE were rebuffed, and we did not receive any kind of extra assistance as many staffers fell ill or in some cases, died. As Cuomo blamed Trump for all of the world’s ill, pestilence and famine, many on ground zero of the outbreak blamed Cuomo. His response was ineffective, and his attitude intolerable. Most of all, he was still forcing Covid positive patients back into nursing homes, which flew in the face of all logic. Maybe he felt that it would be a case of out of sight out of mind and that he didn’t need to come up with a better solution, as the public didn’t care much about nursing homes. And yet, despite his complete and utterly criminal malpractice, he was getting praise in the media, even going so far as to appear in a joking segment with his brother about nasal swabs. As thousands died in facilities, Andrew Cuomo’s deflection of blame onto the evil orange man worked. Absolving him from all sins, was the assertion that if I hate Trump, I am capable of no harm. Health care workers were enraged, and there were even announcements on the facility loudspeaker about how horrible Cuomo is. The general feeling was one of complete contempt for how the Governor reacted, and how the media had treated his crimes.
A most disturbing aspect of our era of politics, and particularly of the Covid-19 era is the tribalism that has taken hold, allowing any behavior to flourish, so long as it’s backed by the right political agenda. I will never forget the people that we lost, or the families that I spoke to. I will never forget what could have been done to save those lives, and how while there may have been many poor responses to Covid- 19, none was as egregious or deadly as New York’s governor. Cuomo’s hands are covered in blood. His recent sexual misconduct allegations are mere fodder compared to the charges of covering up nursing home deaths, and yet the media is more than willing to cover it. They are unable or unwilling to acknowledge their own faults and complicity in not covering the real scandal.
