COVID nursing home deaths follow former Gov. Cuomo as he campaigns to be New York City mayor
CHELSEA, Manhattan (WABC) -- A handful of mayoral candidates are teaming up this weekend to go after challenger Andrew Cuomo, specifically criticizing the former New York governor over his handling of nursing homes during the COVID pandemic.
In April of 2020, one month into the pandemic, COVID-19 began sweeping through nursing homes, with more than 2,400 residents already dead.
Norman Arbeeny, 89, would be one of them. He died at home, 13 days after he was discharged from Cobble Hill Health Center in Brooklyn.
His son, Peter Arbeeny, said he believes his father got COVID in the nursing home.
Peter Arbeeny and his brother Daniel, blame a state directive that ordered nursing homes to readmit their patients, recovering from COVID, and the medically stable. It was a move intended to free up hospital beds.
"It was the single dumbest thing anybody could have done at that time," Peter Arbeeny said.
"We have never said that nursing homes shouldn't have been on the list, but they should have been the absolute last place and not the only place," Daniel Arbeeny said.
The guidance was issued by the State Health Department.
Former Cuomo aide, Paul Francis, said COVID was already in these nursing homes.
"In 600 of the 606 nursing homes in New York, there had been a confirmed COVID infection before a transfer from a hospital of a COVID patient," Francis said.
Cuomo rescinded the order after six weeks.
Over 12,000 nursing home residents died of COVID-19, statewide, numbers Cuomo released after reluctantly including nursing home patients who died in hospitals.
"The biggest problem I have with the governor is that he saw the death tolls rise within a week or two and it took him six weeks to stop it," Peter Arbeeny said. "And then he suppressed the data for a year."
Francis disputes that.
"Deaths had always been recorded in New York in the location in which the death occurred, whether it was a hospital or a nursing home," he said.
Cuomo blasted his critics last year on Capitol Hill.
"All credible studies now say that COVID came into nursing homes through community spread and infected staff, not hospital admissions or readmissions," Cuomo said last September.
Francis said it's an emotional issue for many people, but said "I think the facts are clear that the Cuomo Administration acted properly as part of the nursing home response in the COVID crisis."
But the nursing home deaths are haunting the former governor as he runs for mayor. In a TV ad, City Comptroller Brad Lander visits Norman Arbeeny's gravesite.
"I'm sorry that it took all those years more for you to get an investigation, to really find out what happened," Lander said in the ad.
Queens Assemblyman Ron Kim has been critical of Cuomo.
"I think all the families understood that no one is perfect," he said. "I think it was the cover up of some of the data and doubling down on the bad policies that really upset the family members."
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