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.

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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
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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
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Editor, New York Court Corruption
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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.

Michael Goodwin: Cuomo’s Nursing Home Reversal is Too Little, Too Late For Those Now Dead

Andrew Cuomo
Credit: Hans Pennink

Governor Cuomo was sending all residents who tested positive back into the nursing home where they came from, without the protections needed.

New York State Outrage: Governor Andrew Cuomo Did Not Know His State's Nursing Home Policy

The Dead=Trash Scandal in New York: Nursing Homes Are Not Accurately Reporting The Number of Deaths

Then the media picked up the story of the trucks parked outside of nursing homes and funeral homes with bodies stacked up inside, and Cuomo knew he had political hari-kari on his hands.

So, he reversed his policy.

Michael Goodwin says it's just too late. We agree.

Betsy Combier, 
betsy.combier@gmail.com
Editor, ADVOCATZ.com
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Cuomo’s nursing home reversal is too little, too late for those now dead 

 Michael Goodwin NY POST, May 11, 2020

Gov. Cuomo will never be confused with Fiorello La Guardia. “When I make a mistake, it’s a beaut,” the legendary mayor of New York once confessed.

Unfortunately, Cuomo’s pride and political calculations don’t allow him to admit error even as he finally reverses one of the mostly deadly policy mistakes in New York history.

Nursing homes and rehabilitation centers have tallied more than 5,000 coronavirus deaths, yet the governor accepts zero responsibility despite his March 25th order forcing them to take infected patients from hospitals.

Now he says they no longer have to do that, announcing Sunday that “a hospital cannot discharge a person who is COVID positive to a nursing home.”

Indeed, the initial order denied nursing homes the right even to ask if patients being sent by hospitals had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Now hospitals must do discharge tests and only those who are negative can be referred to nursing homes.

Said one nursing home executive, “It feels at least a month too late.”

The move comes amid growing calls for an independent investigation of the nursing home catastrophe, where the death count dwarfs the total deaths in every other state except New Jersey.

Still, Cuomo claims the reversal is not a reversal, nor is it a recognition of the fatal impact of the initial order.

“Whatever we’re doing has worked, on the facts,” he insisted.

He should try selling that view to Maria Porteus. She lost her father, Carlos Gallegos, to the coronavirus in a Long Island nursing home last month soon after the state forced it to accept infected patients. She watched the governor Sunday and was left steaming.

“I’m still angry and I’m still hurt,” she said. “It’s a slap in the face for him because he’s not taking responsibility for what happened to my father and so many others.”

Porteus said she’s part of a Facebook group that has nearly 250 members who lost loved ones in nursing homes, adding: “The stories are all almost the same. And Cuomo’s still acting like he’s not the one who did this order, like it’s somebody else or it’s the nursing homes’ fault.”

Arlene Mullin, who lost her father under similar circumstances, also was unhappy with Cuomo Sunday. She said in an e-mail:

“In light of how many mothers lost their lives, it was distasteful to use his press conference as a tribute to his mother. He could have called her privately to wish her well on Mother’s Day. It was insensitive to those people whose mothers died in nursing homes due to his cruel policy.”

Cuomo insists the nursing homes “could have resisted” taking COVID-positive patients if they had no ability to care for them. The order, he seemed to be saying, was only meant to ensure that such patients were not discriminated against.

That point, he conceded, “was never really communicated,” as if the March 25 order was not meant to be taken verbatim.

So the only failure is a failure to communicate, though he didn’t specify whose failure that was. Certainly not his.

There are two gaping holes in that argument. First, nursing homes never believed they had any right to deny infected patients, saying the order from the state Department of Health would have included that option if that were the intent. The order’s language did not offer any hint of flexibility.

“No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the NH solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19,” it reads. “NHs are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to ­admission or readmission.”

Worse, the order came without warning, took effect immediately and gave the homes no time to set up segregated beds and staff.

All nursing homes, good and bad, large and small, were treated as if they were fit for an influx of coronavirus patients.

The second problem with Cuomo’s claim is the case of the Cobble Hill Health Center, which lost at least 55 patients to the virus. The CEO, Donny Tuchman, showed reporters April emails where he asked state health officials for assistance and was turned down. He also asked them if COVID-19 patients he had could be sent instead to the Javits Center or the Navy ship Comfort, both of which were far below capacity. He was rejected again.

It’s true there was one way Albany officials did help beleaguered nursing homes. The packages of equipment they sent included body bags.

Former NY State Governor George Pataki Says Gov. Cuomo's Nursing Home Strategy is a 'Disaster'

Gov. Andrew Cuomo (left) and former New York Gov. George Pataki                                           Kevin C. Downs & Annie Wermiel for New York Post

UPDATE:
 On May 11, 2020 the news reports in New York headlined a Cuomo switch where the Governor reversed his nursing home policy - namely, sending residents who have tested positive back to the same place:

See NBC: "We're just not going to send a person who is positive to a nursing home after a hospital visit"

I have posted several articles about the Cuomo nursing home scandal and funeral home tragedy previously (See here, here, here), and now we see this issue is getting political.

Former New York State Governor George Pataki is a Republican. Andrew Cuomo is a Democrat. It is quite possible that supporters of Andrew Cuomo will create a media moment that is based upon partisan interests. This would be a terrible mistake. Political interests need to stay away from the terrible scandals following both Cuomo and his fellow Democrat NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio (see here as well as posts about Bill's wife Chirlane McCray).

Treating the dead as trash is a human tragedy that transcends politics.

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 

Cuomo’s nursing home policies amid coronavirus ‘a disaster,’ says ex-Gov. Pataki

by Carl Campanile, NY POST May 1, 2020

Former Gov. George Pataki slammed Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s nursing home policies during the coronavirus pandemic as a “disaster” that may have unnecessarily caused the deaths of “thousands” of vulnerable elderly residents.

In a rare swipe at his successor Friday night, Pataki called for an independent probe “so this never happens again.”

Pataki said the state Health Department should never have issued an edict requiring nursing homes to accept coronavirus virus patients into nursing home facilities filled with sick, elderly patients — the population most at risk from the killer COVID-19 bug.

Compounding the misguided policy, Pataki said, is that the nursing homes lacked the personal protective equipment or testing capability to isolate and contain the spread of COVID-19.

Pataki also said he was dumbfounded as to why infected patients were sent to nursing homes instead of “hundreds of unused beds” at the two temporary hospitals at the Javits Center and the Navy’s USNS Comfort hospital ship.

“Gov. Cuomo’s handling of the nursing homes has been a disaster,” Pataki, the former-three term governor, told The Post.

“Thousands of people's lives might not have been lost except for these tragic policies.”

Pataki, a Republican who served between 1995 and 2006 said, “Everybody knew that the most vulnerable population was senior citizens. And the most vulnerable senior citizens are in nursing homes.”

Pataki said the nursing homes didn’t have adequate personal protective equipment to protect their existing staff and patients.

“To compound the problem, the state-required nursing homes to admit coronavirus patients. Anyone should have known this would be a problem — to require nursing homes to take in coronavirus patients,” he said.

He also rapped Cuomo for saying “it’s not our job” to provide masks and gowns to nursing homes, though state officials were doing so.

“It is the executive’s job,” Pataki said.

Pataki also said the nursing homes didn’t have or were not provided with the testing needed to determine which patients or staff had the virus.

He also cited a Post report that revealed the state Health Department allowed nurses and other staff who tested positive for the coronavirus to continue treating COVID-19 patients at an upstate nursing home. Following the report, the department said it implemented a new policy restricting COVID-positive staff from returning to work for 14 days.

“Any way you look at it …This is inexcusable. There’s no defense for this,” Pataki said of the policies.

He mentioned Cuomo has become one of the “most popular politicians in America” because of his press briefings on COVID-19.

Still, “it’s not about the appearance but the function of the office,” Pataki said. “The buck stops with the executive office.”

Pataki later went on Fox News and called Cuomo’s policies “incomprehensible” and a “disgrace.”

Cuomo’s senior adviser Rich Azzopardi returned fire, calling Pataki’s attacks a “sad, sad bid for relevancy.”

“It is sad and unfortunate that his star has fallen so much that he’s willing to go on TV and misrepresent the state policy,” which is based on US Centers for Disease Control guidelines, Azzopardi said.

Azzopardi reiterated prior statements from the governor that the nursing homes can only accept coronavirus patients if they have a safe facility with proper staffing and protective equipment.

Cuomo officials also parried widespread complaints of inadequate PPE, saying the state delivered 2 million pieces of protective equipment to nursing homes.

He also said federal policy restricted patients sent to the Comfort hospital.

“George Pataki doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He hasn’t had a clue in 20 years,” Azzopardi said.

Cuomo and Pataki have a complicated relationship.

Pataki defeated former three-term governor Mario Cuomo — Andrew’s dad — to become the state’s chief executive, in 1994.

Andrew Cuomo came under fire during his first bid for governor in 2002 when he said then-Gov. Pataki would just “hold the coat” of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani in terms of leadership following the Sept. 11 attacks. He later abandoned his campaign before the Democratic primary.

But when Cuomo did win the governorship nearly a decade later, he appointed Pataki to serve and co-chair  on a panel that recommended tax cuts. Pataki has generally refrained from second-guessing Cuomo’s actions.