Our family has had questions for the former Gov. Andrew Cuomo for almost five years about the preventable death of our father, Norman Arbeeny, from COVID in April 2020, shortly after being discharged from a Brooklyn nursing home. Now that the former governor is planning a run for mayor, New Yorkers should hear those questions.
The former governor has routinely tried to evade accountability for his decisions regarding nursing home patients during COVID, having been caught distorting the number of deaths in a state report, and then being accused of lying about it to Congress, which referred him for criminal prosecution.
We have sued Cuomo in federal court and our case was dismissed and we are appealing.
Our father and 15,000 other New Yorkers died in 2020 after the Cuomo administration issued a directive to admit more than 9,000 COVID-19 positive patients into ill-prepared nursing homes when well-equipped assets, such as the USS Comfort and the Javits Center remained mainly unused.
Over the years, my brother and I repeatedly requested meetings of the governor, who publicly dismissed us. I had voted for him because I believed he would support and protect all our families. Instead, he gaslit us, defending his March 25, 2020 directive regarding hospital discharges and admissions to nursing homes and falsely declaring that he followed President Trump’s federal CDC/CMS guidelines.
As our court appeal continues, we requested a public meeting with Cuomo, which admittedly is unusual during pending litigation. The questions I want to ask the governor are not only for my family, but for the thousands of other grieving families who are also trying to understand what happened to their loved ones who died as a result of the March 25, 2020 directive.
I remain optimistic and hope that we do hear from Andrew Cuomo, and if that is the case this is some of what our families want to know:
Merely saying that your directive was following federal guidelines doesn’t make it true. We would ask you which sentences in your March 25 administration directive are taken from the federal CMS or CDC guidelines? It seems that very little of your order is found in the federal guidelines. Your directive uses terms like “medically stable” that are not found in the federal guidelines. In addition, you use “standard precautions” instead of CDC Transmission-Based Precautions.
If the Cuomo administration’s March 25 directive was consistent with federal guidance, why was it rescinded on May 10, 2020? Was May 10 the first day the Cuomo administration stopped adhering to the federal guidelines or the day they started following them?
Many of us were present in the room when the former governor testified to Congress last September, sitting just behind him. When he was asked if he would like to turn around and apologize to us face to face, he refused. In 2020, he miscalculated the power of an apology, and he is still grossly miscalculating it.
This issue of COVID and nursing homes will arise over and over again if he runs for mayor of New York City. This issue also mars the Democratic Party’s reputation as they remain tone-deaf to repeated requests for an investigation about what happened with nursing homes in the early months of COVID.
Would we not already have had an exhaustive investigation by multiple state and city agencies if Cuomo was a Republican? What happened to being committed to the impartial pursuit of justice, without regard to political affiliation or motivation and without fear or favor? When will my Democratic Party realize that we must hold ourselves to a higher moral standard first, before requiring that of the opposite party?
Don’t get me wrong, there are some genuine members of both parties who have supported us, listened to our pain, and even, at times, hugged us! The first was Brad Lander and recently Mayor Adams. But we need more than that for justice to be served.
We are not holding our collective breath, hoping that Andrew Cuomo will meet with us, despite the lawsuit. Why would we suddenly believe that Cuomo has changed after all this time, and really wants to sit and listen to our family’s stories? But rest assured, we’re not going away quietly and our family will remain loud and clear, until we meet with him — and in a manner where all New Yorkers can see it for themselves.
Arbeeny is a Cobble Hill resident. He lost his father, Norman Arbeeny, who died from COVID-19 on April 21, 2020, 13 days after being discharged from a nursing home.