Veteran actor James Woods on Wednesday dubbed New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo “Killer Cuomo” amid intense criticism over the governor’s directive for nursing homes to accept Chinese coronavirus patients discharged from hospitals.
Woods began by tweeting a photo of aged school lockers with one of them tagged with the name, “Killer.”
“Andrew Cuomo finds his old locker!” Woods quipped.
Next, the Casino star shared a New York Post article in which New York Health Commissioner Howard Zucker is revealed to have failed to track nursing home deaths for an entire month after the state reported its first virus death.
Woods then shared a photo of a tarp hung off an overpass that reads in large, red letters: “Cuomo killed my mom.” Woods captioned the photo, which has yet to be confirmed as authentic, with the hashtag, “Killer Cuomo.”
Cuomo has received blowback for a now-reversed March 25 order on nursing homes, which reads: “No resident [of a nursing home] shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH [nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19. NHs are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.”
Over 4,800 people have died in New York nursing homes between March 1 and May 1, per New York state officials.
Cuomo faced criticism at a recent briefing for saying that providing masks and gowns to nursing homes is “not our job” because the homes are privately owned.
“It was such an insensitive thing to say,” said state Assemblyman Ron Kim, a Queens Democrat who noted that it wasn’t until just this past week that New York and neighboring states announced a plan to combine forces to buy protective gear and medical supplies for nursing homes.
“If we had focused on that early on,” he said, “we could have saved a lot of lives.”
Cuomo’s administration defended its response to the crisis, saying it has provided more than 10 million pieces of protective equipment to nursing homes and created a database of 95,000 workers who have helped out in hundreds of New York homes.
“This was an overwhelming situation for everyone,” said Jim Malatras, who serves on the governor’s COVID-19 task force. “There were deaths and it’s unfortunate. But it doesn’t mean we weren’t aggressive.”
One key criticism is that New York took weeks after the first known home care outbreaks to begin publicly reporting the number of deaths in individual homes — and still doesn’t report the number of cases. By the time New York began disclosing the deaths in the middle of last month, the state had several major outbreaks with at least 40 deaths each, most of which were a surprise to the surrounding communities and even some family members.
The AP contributed to this report.
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