Chelsea, Manhattan (WABC) – A small number of mayoral candidates are teaming up this weekend after challenger Andrew Cuomo.
In April 2020, a month after the pandemic, Covid-19 began to take over nursing homes, with more than 2,400 residents already dead.
89-year-old Norman Irvinny is one of them. He passed away at his home 13 days after being discharged from the Cobble Hill Health Center in Brooklyn.
His son, Peter Irviney, said he believes his father has obtained covid in a nursing home.
Peter Irviny and his brother Daniel ordered nursing homes to reread patients, repelling COVID and denounced the medically stable state order. The movement was intended to free the hospital bed.
“It was the only stupid thing no one could do at the time,” Peter Irviney said.
“We've never said nursing homes shouldn't be on the list, but they were the absolute final locations and not the only one,” Daniel Irviney said.
The order was signed by Governor Cuomo. Cuomo claimed he simply followed the federal government's guidance.
Former Cuomo aide Paul Francis said Covid was already in these nursing homes.
“Of the 606 nursing homes in New York, 600 had confirmed COVID infections before Covid patients moved from the hospital,” Francis said.
Cuomo cancelled the order six weeks later.
More than 12,000 nursing home residents have died of Covid-19 in Cuomo, who was reluctantly released after being released, including a nursing home patient who died in the hospital.
“The biggest problem I have with the governor is that the death toll rose within a week or two and it took him six weeks to stop it,” Peter Irbiney said. “And he suppressed the data for a year.”
Francis disputes that.
“In New York, deaths were always recorded where death occurred, whether in a hospital or a nursing home,” he said.
Cuomo blasted critics on Capitol Hill last year.
“All reliable studies now say that Covid has come to nursing homes through community spread and infected staff rather than hospitalizations or readmissions,” Cuomo said last September.
Francis said it was an emotional issue for many, but “it is clear that the Cuomo administration acted appropriately as part of nursing home response during the Covid crisis.”
But the death of the nursing home plagues the former governor when he runs for the mayor. In the TV ads, mayor Brad Lander visits Norman Irviney's Cemetery.
“We are sorry it took you more years for your investigation to really find out what happened,” Lander said in the ad.
Queens MP Ron Kim was critical of Cuomo.
“I think every family knew that no one was perfect,” he said. “I think it was a cover-up of some data and doubled the bad policies that really disrupt the families.”
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