Since Cuomo’s book was published, blaming New York’s high death toll on the virus supposedly sneaking here from Europe, the coronavirus has killed about 15,000 additional people in New York. Many more are getting sick and being transported to the kinds of underfunded hospitals Cuomo is always trying to downsize or close down altogether…

Cuomo’s paean to his own pandemic response was supposed to crown his dubious career and effectively disseminate propaganda that would make him beloved by the public forever. It explains away how he dismissed the idea of a shelter-in-place order for New York and pretends he did not, for much of March 2020, compare the coronavirus to the flu while also insisting that fear was at least as dangerous as the disease. And it elides how he forced nursing homes to readmit coronavirus patients, created a far-reaching immunity shield for health-care facilities and hospitals that only Mitch McConnell could dream of, and undercounted deaths in nursing homes.

Had Cuomo been a little less reckless and arrogant, he may have gotten away with all of it. Most journalists and pundits believed he had done the best he could in the first month of the pandemic, even if that was not the case. The real nursing home death toll could’ve been shared with the state legislature.