"It’s the lying and the manipulation that is indefensible"

“This all stems from a state directive that basically forced nursing homes to accept Covid positive patients released from the hospitals,” Hayes explained. “And in hindsight that looks like a pretty bad decision. At the time there were lots of decisions being made very quickly amidst a, you know, unprecedented pandemic. We were being confronted on something nobody had experienced before. And hospitals were overwhelmed, crunched for space. So given that, some bad decisions are at least defensible.”

The Cuomo administration’s response to the Times was to claim that the nursing home deaths figure was left out out of a concern of “potential double counting.”

“To state the obvious this is really, really bad,” Hayes said, calling out the governor. “It’s the lying and the manipulation that is indefensible. That’s the thing about the Trump administration and their Covid management that was indefensible. When Trump said: ‘I want to keep people on the cruise ship because I didn’t want those numbers,’ that’s not a defensible position, right? You can make mistakes in managing Covid, and people did. But that’s not a defensible position, to artificially suppress the numbers. And that same principle applies here.”