Betsy McCaughey: New York’s Nursing Home Horrors Are Even Worse Than You Think

Andrew Cuomo

In March-April 2020 New Yorkers gave Governor Andrew Cuomo huge acclaim for his daily COVID-19 TV appearances, but this praise did not last.

People in NY State as well as in the rest of the United States are appalled at his policy of sending seniors who tested positive to nursing homes and/or keeping seniors in nursing homes without adequate protections against the virus, only to die.

Reports now say that 26,000 people have died in nursing homes due to the coronavirus.

See:
N.Y. Gov. Andrew Cuomo's careless cruelty shows in coronavirus nursing home policy

Shame of Andrew Cuomo’s blame game: Goodwin

The media, especially the NY POST, documented every bad decision Cuomo made, and then some. Andrew Cuomo's ridiculous on-camera joke-fest with his brother Chris Cuomo fell flat and now only brings the Cuomo brothers well-deserved disgust.

We are with the NY POST on this issue.

They both need to be removed from any public forums, and Andrew should be investigated. He will, hopefully, be sued by relatives of the dead seniors who died because of his nursing home policy (dead=trash)

Betsy Combier, betsy.combier@gmail.com
Editor, ADVOCATZ.com
Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials 

Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Health Department mandated on March 25 that nursing homes had
to accept coronavirus patients and barred requiring any COVID-19 tests for admission Mike Groll/Office of Governor Andrew Cuomo

New York’s nursing home horrors are even worse than you think
NY POST, May 30, 2020

Patricia Castillo remembers when the Newfane Rehab and Health Care Center, where her mother lived, notified her that a patient had just been admitted from a nearby Niagara County hospital with COVID-19.

Jill Sawyer, whose father lived at the same nursing home, remembers getting notified, too. “It was just a death sentence,” said Sawyer. The virus raced through Newfane, killing Castillo’s mother and Sawyer’s father and 24 other residents.

“My father was only 70 years old,” Sawyer sighs, and he was still “shuffling around and calling me 20 times a day.” Now, she says the phone doesn’t ring and she misses that.

COVID-19 has killed at least 11,000 to 12,000 nursing-home and assisted-living residents in New York, nearly double what the state admits to. And as the deaths mount, so have the lies and cover-ups.

The carnage started in March, when hospitals inundated with COVID-19 patients insisted on clearing out elderly patients, even if they were still infected, and sending them to whatever nursing homes had empty beds. To swing that, they had to get rid of a safety regulation requiring patients to test negative twice for COVID-19 before being placed in a home. The state Health Department willingly complied.

On March 25, Gov. Cuomo’s Health Department mandated that nursing homes had to accept COVID patients and barred requiring any COVID tests for admission. Facilities like Newfane had to fly blind, not knowing which incoming patients had it.

The American Health Care Association called it a “recipe for disaster.” The Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths urged Cuomo to change course.

Instead, New York’s health commissioner, Howard Zucker, began fudging the death statistics, which concealed the consequences: Until late April, New York had reported all nursing-home residents who died from COVID-19, whether they died at the home or after being hospitalized. That’s standard. But as the toll soared, the state quietly shifted to reporting only deaths at the homes. That reduced the number to 6,062 — terrible but only half the truth.

The reality is, at least another 17,000 elder-care patients with COVID-19 were sent to hospitals, and an estimated 5,000 to 7,000 of them have died, with death rates highest for those on ventilators, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association’s mortality rates.

Bottom line: 11,000 to 12,000 nursing-home and assisted-living residents have died from COVID-19, half of all the virus deaths statewide.

The health-care think tank American Commitment also pegs the deaths at 12,000.

That awful death toll didn’t have to happen. It’s six times the number of nursing-home fatalities as in Florida or California, both more populous states.

Cuomo also tried to shift the blame to President Trump, pointing to a Trump administration statement issued on March 13. But the Cuomo administration is twisting it. The statement recommended nursing homes admit patients even if they were coming from a hospital battling COVID-19, not that patients with COVID-19 themselves had to be admitted.

In fact, on March 18, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cautioned against allowing COVID-19 to invade a nursing home, warning that “it has the potential to result in high attack rates among residents, staff members and visitors.”

Cuomo’s “attempt to deflect blame onto the president sickens me,” says Castillo.

New York stuck with its deadly policy until May 10, way too long. Why? Because it wasn’t a mistake. It was a sell-out.

The hospital industry’s lobbying organization, the Greater New York Hospital Association, is a mega-donor to the state Democratic Party’s housekeeping committee, which helps elect Cuomo. It gave over $1 million in 2018. The hospital industry holds more sway in Albany than real estate or Wall Street.

No wonder Cuomo’s Health Department does the industry’s bidding.

Castillo is pained that her mother had to die alone, “isolated from those who loved her.” She hopes someone will “hold the governor’s feet to the fire.”

At the least, New Yorkers should demand a health department that protects the vulnerable instead of catering to political donors.

Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York, the chairwoman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and author of the forthcoming book “The Next Pandemic.”

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A 'Deplorables' Moment For Joe Biden

Former vice president Joe Biden presents a condescending impression of African American voters in his interview with The Breakfast Club" radio co-host "Charlamagne tha God".

A ‘deplorables’ moment for Joe Biden shows why he won’t win the black vote: Devine
by Miranda Devine, NY POST, May 24, 2020

Joe Biden’s disastrous interview with black radio host Charlamagne Tha God on Friday encapsulates everything that is wrong with the Democratic Party and its presidential hopeful.

“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, you ain’t black,” the former vice president blurted out at the end of the interview.

It was a statement so staggeringly, primitively racist, that it landed like a gut punch to many black Americans, of all political persuasions, who took to the airwaves to denounce it over the weekend.

“It played into the long-standing notion that the black vote is uncritical and guaranteed,” said left-wing writer Roxane Gay.

Former NFL player Jack Brewer declared “the mask is off.”

“Pure unadulterated hubris, the taking for granted of the black vote,” said ex-Bernie Sanders campaign co-chair Nina Turner, one of many who took issue with Biden’s patronizing use of the ungrammatical “ain’t.”

Attempts by the Biden campaign to claim the comment was made “in jest” were futile, even as Democratic-friendly media such as CNN ignored the story.

Biden’s attempt at damage control also fell flat. Perhaps he was “too cavalier,” he mused, and shouldn’t have been a “wise guy.”

Neither of those descriptions is accurate. Biden clearly was annoyed by abrasive questions from Charlamagne, whose breakfast show attracts more than 4 million young black listeners.

Biden’s irritation had been building since the opening question about “your cognitive health. I don’t think everything’s working upstairs.”

The 17-minute interview descended into a series of shouted monologues from Biden, complete with “Come on, man” and “get a life” outbursts.

It was not a friendly affair.

“A lot of black voters, including myself, feel . . . that Democrats take black voters for granted,” was one question that set Biden off on a 900-word rant about his prowess in winning black votes, which only ended when a staffer off-camera tried to cut the interview short.

His staff could see the danger signs, but Biden was on a roll.

As we have seen with his “Hey, fat” and “lying dog-faced pony soldier” outbursts on the campaign trail, Biden is quick to anger and embellishes his achievements when challenged.

For instance, he told Charlamagne: “The NAACP has endorsed me every time I’ve run.”

But the NAACP issued a denial, saying it “does not endorse candidates for political office.”

Biden also said: “I come from a state with the eighth-largest black population in America.” But Delaware has just 220,000 black residents, ranking in bottom one-third of states.

Another exchange captured Biden’s odd mix of aggrieved passivity.

“I’m wondering, how are you going to energize people and win a campaign from [your] house?” asked Charlamagne, kindly not mentioning the word “basement.”

The astonishing response from the man who aspires to be leader of the free world was that he is just doing what he was told: “I’m following the rules, man . . . My governor says he doesn’t want us out. I haven’t been out. I wear my mask. I have a mask. I got Secret Service outside. I walk outside. I have it on.”

The interview was a train crash. And, as his staff anticipated, it was always going to end in tears.

“Ain’t black” is Biden’s “deplorables” moment. Yet his supporters seem oblivious to the lethal blow it has delivered to his prospects, just as Hillary Clinton didn’t comprehend the catastrophe of her “basket of deplorables” insult to half of America in 2016.

Biden confirmed what Candace Owens’ “Blexit” movement is all about, the exit by black Americans from a Democratic Party that takes their vote for granted and traps them in a victim narrative.

Of all the rebukes to Biden over the weekend, probably the most eloquent came from Tim Scott, the Senate’s only black Republican, who pointed out to ABC that 1.3 million African Americans voted for Trump in 2016.

“Joe Biden told every single one of us we ‘ain’t black’ . . . It sends the wrong message to the young people of this nation that you have to stay in line or you’re not black enough . . . I remember being a kid in high school with people putting labels on me, whether I was an ‘Oreo,’ or someone who did not quite fit in.”

Scott said Biden should be judged on his 1994 crime bill, which included a mandatory life sentence for repeat offenders and “locked up more African-American men than any other crime bill in the last 50 years.”

He also raised Biden’s telling history of racial gaffes, including his comment: “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.”

Scott asked: “Is that to suggest that every single kid in America that’s living in poverty, like the poverty I grew up in, has to be black?”

Biden’s internal filter has always been faulty, but lately it has deserted him entirely.

His latest id-explosion narrows his options for a running mate, after he already locked himself into choosing a woman. Now, as Charlamagne says, the only way to atone is to choose a black woman.

Nursing Biden over the finish line looks increasingly precarious for the Dems.

Betsy Combier
Editor, ADVOCATZ.com
Editor, ADVOCATZ blog
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials 

Hans Taparia On The Move To Virtual College

Chance Bonar, a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard, teaching an online class from his dorm in Cambridge, Mass., in April.Credit...Blake Nissen for The Boston Globe, via Getty Images

OPINION

The Future of College Is Online, and It’s Cheaper

The coronavirus forced a shift to virtual classes, but their continuation could be beneficial even after the pandemic ends.

By Hans Taparia, NY TIMES, May 25, 2020

Mr. Taparia is a clinical associate professor at the New York University Stern School of Business.

• 
  

Forty years ago, going to college in America was a reliable pathway for upward mobility. Today, it has become yet another 21st-century symbol of privilege for the wealthy. Through this period, tuition rates soared 260 percent, double the rate of inflation. In 2019, the average cost of attending a four-year private college was over $200,000. For a four-year public college, it was over $100,000. To sustain these prices, more students are now admitted from the top 1 percent of the income scale than the entire bottom 40 percent at the top 80 colleges. Universities have also opened the floodgates to wealthy international students, willing to pay full tuition for the American brand.

Covid-19 is about to ravage that business model. Mass unemployment is looming large and is likely to put college out of reach for many. With America now the epicenter of the pandemic and bungling its response, many students are looking to defer enrollment. Foreign students are questioning whether to register at all, with greater uncertainty around visas and work prospects. The “Trump Effect” had already begun to cause declining foreign student enrollment over the past three years.

The mightiest of institutions are bracing for the worst. Harvard, home to the country’s largest endowment, recently announced drastic steps to manage the fallout, including salary cuts for its leadership, hiring freezes and cuts in discretionary spending. Most other universities have been forced to make similar decisions, and are nervous that if they continue with online teaching this fall, students will demand at least a partial remission of tuition.

Up until now, online education has been relegated to the equivalent of a hobby at most universities. With the pandemic, it has become a backup plan. But if universities embrace this moment strategically, online education could expand access exponentially and drop its cost by magnitudes — all while shoring up revenues for universities in a way that is more recession-proof, policy-proof and pandemic-proof.

To be clear, the scramble to move online over just a few days this March did not go well. Faculty members were forced to revamp lesson plans overnight. “Zoom-bombers” took advantage of lax privacy protocols. Students fled home, with many in faraway time zones prolonging jet lag just to continue synchronous learning. Not surprisingly, the experience for both students and faculty has left much to be desired. According to one survey, more than 75 percent of students do not feel they received a quality learning experience after classrooms closed.

But what surveys miss are the numerous spirited efforts to break new ground, as only a crisis can be the impetus for.

One professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts taught a drama course that allows students to “act” with each other in virtual reality using Oculus Quest headsets. A music professor at Stanford trained his students on software that allows musicians in different locations to perform together using internet streaming. Professors are pioneering new methods and ed-tech companies are developing platforms at a pace not seen before, providing a glimpse into the untapped potential of online education. Not to be forgotten, of course, is the fact that just a few years ago, a transition to online learning at the current scale would have been unimaginable.

Before the pandemic, most universities never truly embraced online education, at least not strategically. For years, universities have allowed professors to offer some courses online, making them accessible through aggregators such as edX or Coursera. But rarely do universities offer their most popular and prestigious degrees remotely. It is still not possible to get an M.B.A. at Stanford, a biology degree at M.I.T. or a computer science degree at Brown online.

On one hand, universities don’t want to be seen as limiting access to education, so they have dabbled in the space. But to fully embrace it might render much of the faculty redundant, reduce the exclusivity of those degrees, and threaten the very existence of the physical campus, for which vast resources have been allocated over centuries

For good reason, many educators have been skeptical of online learning. They have questioned how discussion-based courses, which require more intimate settings, would be coordinated. They wonder how lab work might be administered. Of course, no one doubts that the student experience would not be as holistic. But universities don’t need to abandon in-person teaching for students who see the value in it.

They simply need to create “parallel” online degrees for all their core degree programs. By doing so, universities could expand their reach by thousands, creating the economies of scale to drop their costs by tens of thousands.

There are a few, but instructive, examples of prestigious universities that have already shown the way. Georgia Tech, a top engineering school, launched an online masters in computer science in 2014. The degree costs just $7,000 (one-sixth the cost of its in-person program), and the school now has nearly 10,000 students enrolled, making it the largest computer science program in the country. Notably, the online degree has not cannibalized its on-campus revenue stream. Instead, it has opened up a prestigious degree program to a different population, mostly midcareer applicants looking for a meaningful skills upgrade.

Similarly, in 2015, the University of Illinois launched an online M.B.A. for $22,000, a fraction of the cost of most business schools. In order to provide a forum for networking and experiential learning, critical to the business school experience, the university created micro-immersions, where students can connect with other students and work on live projects at companies at a regional level.

To do this would require a major reorientation of university resources and activities. Classrooms would need to be fitted with new technology so that lectures could be simultaneously delivered to students on campus as well as across the world. Professors would need to undergo training on how to effectively teach to a blended classroom. Universities would also be well served to build competencies in content production. Today, almost all theory-based content, whether in chemistry, computer science or finance, can be produced in advance and effectively delivered asynchronously. By tapping their best-rated professors to be the stars of those productions, universities could actually raise the pedagogical standard.

There are already strong examples of this. Most biology professors, for instance, would find themselves hard pressed to match the pedagogical quality, production values and inspirational nature of Eric Lander’s online Introduction to Biology course at M.I.T. That free course currently has over 134,000 students enrolled this semester.

Once universities have developed a library of content, they can choose to draw from it for asynchronous delivery for years, both for their on-campus and online programs. Students may not mind. It would, after all, open up professor capacity for a larger number of live interactions. Three-hour lectures, which were never good for anyone, would become a thing of the past. Instead, a typical day might be broken up into one-hour sessions with a focus on problem-solving, Q. and A. or discussion.

Many universities are sounding bold about reopening in-person instruction this fall. The current business model requires them to, or face financial ruin. But a hasty decision driven by the financial imperative could prove lethal, and do little to help them weather a storm. The pandemic provides universities an opportunity to reimagine education around the pillars of access and affordability with the myriad tools and techniques now at their disposal. It could make them true pathways of upward mobility again.

Betsy Combier
Editor, ADVOCATZ.com
Editor, ADVOCATZ blog
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials 

NYCLU: Communities of Color Have Been Put At Risk Because of Public Policy

HOW THE GOVERNMENT CREATED HIGH-RISK COMMUNITIES

NYCLU

By Toni Smith-Thompson, Senior Organizer, Field

MAY 22, 2020 - 3:15PM

Governor Cuomo said in late March that the coronavirus "doesn't discriminate." But, as early as January 2020, when the pandemic was reportedly likely to hit China's poor residents hardest, it was clear that COVID-19 would most severely impact "at-risk" communities in the United States and New York as well.

This week, the New York State legislature held a hearing exploring solutions to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on "minority communities." The NYCLU's testimony called for a range of remedies for people and communities of color, who – according to state and national data – are being hit hardest by this pandemic.

Contrary to common assertions, communities of color aren't at greater risk because of personal choices. Communities of color have been consistently put at risk because of public policy.

This public health crisis has exposed the detrimental effects of systemic racism on the socioeconomic and environmental conditions that largely determine a person's health. 

Health outcomes at the individual and community levels are deeply impacted by social environment. These factors include income, education level, family and social support, and experience of discrimination, as well as physical environment – including place of residence, crowding conditions, air and water quality, and transportation systems.

In turn, these factors tend to determine a person or community's "health services environment," which includes people's access to and quality of care.

Taken together, this means that socioeconomic factors, environmental factors, and their interaction with access to care are far more determinative of health outcomes than individual behaviors.  

The COVID-19 pandemic technically began in late December of last year, when the first known case was confirmed. But it also began in the 1930s, when the Federal Housing Authority subsidized the development of entire suburbs, with the requirement that no homes be sold to African Americans. And in the 1940s, when the GI Bill was structured to deny benefits to African-Americans. And in the many instances of land theft from Indigenous nations. And when neighborhoods of color were used as dumping grounds for toxic waste. 

It is time to remove the risks imposed upon communities of color and repair the generations of harms they've caused.

Decades of public policy decisions led to deep divisions in who has land, space, and clean air. While that has always resulted in inequities, they are especially stark now, as data continues to show that people living in high-density, historically redlined neighborhoods are being hit hardest by COVID-19.

Similarly, concerns about remote learning and the "digital divide" seem new, but they are the product of decades of unequal school funding that funneled more resources to already wealthy school districts and left under-resourced communities behind, even though they are facing the greatest barriers to remote education right now.

And, while the outbreak of COVID-19 in jails and prisons across the country started just a few months ago, it is the result of decades of mass incarceration that punished, exploited, and denied liberty to people of color.

New York's carceral system's destruction of communities of color reflects the decades of public policy choices: racist mandatory minimum prison sentences under the Rockefeller Drug Laws, broken windows policing, the cash bail system, the torture of solitary confinement, voter disenfranchisement, housing and employment restrictions, and the policing of children at school.

Syracuse provides a stark example of the ways in which race, social and environmental factors, and government policy have interacted to predetermine the virus' impact.

In Syracuse, many of the neighborhoods most affected by COVID were once redlined – a historic practice that denied Black people access to quality housing. Across New York as well as in Syracuse, the neighborhoods hardest hit by COVID are the neighborhoods with the lowest proportion of white residents.

A review of EPA Lead Paint and Respiratory Hazard Indexes in Syracuse also shows that the communities most impacted by COVID are more exposed to ongoing environmental hazards, and more likely to be food deserts. Neighborhoods like these are also likely to be those where employment and income levels lag behind, which hurts the tax base and causes underfunding of education.   

These conditions are compounded by the mental, emotional and physical effects of perpetually experiencing state-sanctioned violence and terror that accompany racism.

The collective experience of a pandemic causes a myriad of traumas related to exposure to the virus, social isolation, loss of loved ones, loss of work and education, community devastation, and more. We have yet to appreciate the long-term impacts of this crisis.

But when it comes to the physical and psychological toll of racism, too often, public policy narratives focus far more on the perceived deficits of communities of color.

We must shift the focus towards undoing oppressive conditions, through policing and criminal legal system reforms that reduce the number of people who are arrested and behind bars, stronger worker protections that will especially benefit people of color and immigrant New Yorkers, and investments in education.

As we advocate for policy solutions to mitigate the immediate harms to people and communities in this period of crisis, we must also address structural racism – a foundational policy undergirding the inequities we seek to fix.

It is time to remove the risks imposed upon communities of color and repair the generations of harms they've caused.

Miranda Devine: Gov. Andrew Cuomo is a Hypocrite on Life, Death and Nursing Homes

The updates posted below about the dead=trash nursing home scandal in New York show that Gov. Andrew Cuomo, his brother Chris Cuomo, and the Cuomo cabal could not care less about what the general public thinks about their health and welfare for NY State's citizens into a trash bin.

The real tragedy is that New Yorkers have a clown as the Governor, a man who wants fame and glory much more than the safety of the people in his constituency. 

And, he's blaming everyone but himself for the scandal.

Wake up, New York!

Betsy Combier
Editor, ADVOCATZ.com
Editor, ADVOCATZ blog
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials 

Gov. Andrew Cuomo is a hypocrite on life, death and nursing homes: Devine

NY POST May 20, 2020

In his daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo was as haughty and boastful as ever.

The difference this time was that the Albany press pack didn’t give him a free pass.

It’s incredible how highly he rates himself when he has presided over the most COVID deaths of any state in the nation by far — 22,976 as of Wednesday, some seven times more than California, 11 times more than Florida. New York still hasn’t come to grips with why that is. The disparity is not a random act of God, as the governor would have us believe.

He bears at least some culpability. He was slower to respond to the threat of the virus. And then he compounded that error with the unforgivably callous act of forcing nursing homes to admit COVID-positive patients — a death sentence for other residents as the infection spread like wildfire.

And yet, not a trace of worry do we see on Cuomo’s tanned face.

There is no remorse, just buck-passing.

Wednesday, for instance, he blamed President Trump for the nursing-home deaths. The chutzpah is astonishing.

But at least he faced tough questions about a potential federal probe into his March 25 directive to nursing homes.

“I have refrained from politics,” he said, laughably. “But anyone who wants to ask ‘why did the state do that with COVID patients and nursing homes,’ it’s because the state followed President Trump’s CDC guidance.

“So they should ask President Trump.”

Cuomo even tried to claim that the more-than-5,500 deaths connected to nursing homes in New York was a better toll, per capita, than most other states.

Howard Zucker

But the state Department of Health seems to have fudged the death toll, admitting it does not count nursing-home residents who ended up dying in hospital of the coronavirus, so the real numbers are much higher.

Asked about this convenient accounting, Cuomo returned to Trump: “The state followed President Trump’s CDC guidance . . . No numbers were changed.”

A reporter pointed out that Cuomo has shown a “willingness to thwart President Trump at other times.” Why not on his March 25 nursing-home directive?

Good question, which ­Cuomo couldn’t answer.

Instead, he switched to blaming the nursing homes.

“In retrospect, do you think that was a bad decision? Do you think it contributed to the death toll?”

“No,” said Cuomo. “Because you have to be saying the nursing homes were wrong in accepting COVID-positive patients.”

It is Kafkaesque. First, he orders nursing homes to obey a directive with his name emblazoned at the top of the page: “All NHs must comply with the expedited receipt of residents returning from hospitals . . . No resident shall be denied readmis­sion or admission to the NH solely on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.”

The nursing homes were “prohibited” in that March 25 directive even from COVID-testing discharged patients.

But now that the policy has blown up in his face, he blames those same nursing homes for doing what he ordered them to do.

“We always had alternative beds . . . Any nursing home could just say, ‘I can’t handle a COVID person.’ ”

Yet in April he told a reporter at a press conference that the nursing homes “don’t have the right to object.”

His reversal of the directive on Mother’s Day was a tacit acknowledgement of wrong­doing, as was the legal indemnity for nursing homes that he reportedly slipped into the state budget in late March.

The terrible thing about ­Cuomo is that he has the appearance of being everything he’s not. He is a facsimile of a take-charge alpha male who stands up and takes responsibility. In reality, he behaves like a dithering, vain, deceitful bully.

He appears to be a moral Catholic family man who talks about his days as an altar boy and expresses concern for the sanctity of life.

“To me, I say the cost of a human life, a human life is priceless. Period,” he philosophized one day while trying to justify his decision to keep everyone in lockdown.

But it’s not true. He doesn’t think every human life is precious at all.

Last year he pushed for ­euthanasia legislation and gloated about signing into law the state’s late-term abortion laws. He even had One World Trade Center lit in hot pink in an obscene celebration of death.

And didn’t he just tell us breezily last week, as the heat from his nursing-home fiasco dialed up: “Older people, vulnerable people are going to die from this virus. That is going to happen despite whatever you do.”

He made sure of it.

We knew from the start of the pandemic that the frail elderly were most at risk. Florida, with its big retired population, moved early to protect nursing homes.

A mistake is one thing, but Cuomo’s lack of remorse or self-doubt is chilling.

“I feel very good about how exhaustive I have been in communicating,” he boasted on Wednesday.

It is true he has been communicating “exhaustively.”

His “love gov” routine — joking around with his brother on CNN and strutting his stuff as New York’s most eligible bachelor — has done wonders for his approval ratings.

But it doesn’t save the people who died distressing deaths, unnecessarily and alone, in nursing homes that he knew could barely cope at the best of times.

Cuomo brothers' jokey CNN interview ignoring nursing home controversy sparks outrage

Health Commissioner Howard Zucker's approach to the coronavirus crisis in nursing
homes is even worse than critics thought. Credit: Hans Pennink

Health Commissioner Zucker’s nursing-home failures were worse than thought

By Post Editorial Board

Health Commissioner Howard Zucker’s approach to the coronavirus crisis in nursing homes is even worse than we’d thought: It turns out his Department of Health didn’t even try to track deaths in homes for a full month after the state reported its first fatalities.

New York’s first confirmed COVID-19 deaths came March 14, but it wasn’t until April 17 that DOH began comprehensively asking nursing-home administrators how many residents had died of the disease, the Syracuse Post-Standard has revealed.

The department was in contact — sending daily questionnaires asking how many masks and how much hand sanitizer homes had on hand, among other data. But it wasn’t until news broke of growing outrage among residents’ families that the state thought to systematically ask the most crucial question.

And then DOH just flailed: It e-mailed homes on April 17 at 7:03 a.m. to ask, “What is the total number of residents who have died in your nursing home of COVID-19?” It set an 8:45 a.m. deadline for replies.

The next day, it ordered administrators to document every coronavirus death over the prior six weeks — in a noon e-mail with a 2:30 p.m. deadline.

All this, as Zucker mandated on March 25 that homes take in COVID-positive patients. That’s right: He gave that order without having even tried to learn how many residents were dying from the bug. (Then again, this is the guy who ordered EMTs to not bother trying to resuscitate heart-attack victims until The Post exposed that madness.)

Zucker seems to have focused purely on keeping hospitals from becoming overwhelmed, to the point of sending infected patients into the facilities housing those most vulnerable to the bug. Now the virus has taken some 5,600 nursing-home lives, and experts believe the true toll is far higher.

Gov. Cuomo has repeatedly insisted his team is basing all its moves on the data, yet Zucker wasn’t even collecting key info on the most at-risk population. Surely the Empire State deserves a better health commissioner than this.