On Twitter, outraged family members of the 6,600 or so seniors who died in New York nursing homes were especially incensed. On March 25, in a bid to free up hospital beds, Cuomo issued an order that told nursing homes they had to accept patients that may be infected. Cuomo later withdrew the order.
Still, no Democrats blamed Cuomo for the casualties in the true blue Empire State.
The blame lies with Trump, they argued, because he didn’t take the virus seriously when it hit the United States. When he should have ordered Americans to stay home, instead he urged people to go about their business. He cared more about the economy than American lives, critics claimed.
On March 7, Trump said of the virus: “We closed it down. We stopped it.” And “We’re doing very well and we’ve done a fantastic job.”
Which sounds pretty bad — if you don’t know that on March 8 Cuomo told reporters, “There is more fear, more anxiety, than the facts would justify. This is not the Ebola virus, this is not the SARS virus, this is a virus that we have a lot of information on.”
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