Cuomo’s nursing home scandal raises questions for one of his senior aides

Last July, when the New York State Department of Health issued a absolving the Cuomo administration of responsibility for the soaring number of COVID-19 deaths in the state's nursing homes, Jim Malatras was tasked with handling what quickly became a storm of criticism. Malatras said the report's authors had used a sophisticated statistical model to reach a persuasive conclusion: Infected nursing home staff had been the chief driver of the spread of disease and death, not the thousands of potentially still-contagious patients transferred from hospitals to the homes under a Cuomo administration policy adopted early in the pandemic. Gary Holmes, a spokesperson for the health department, said in a statement that the department in fact performed an analysis last July that included all deaths of nursing home residents — those who died in facilities and in hospitals — and the result was the same: The greatest surge in deaths at the homes resulted from infected workers and not the state's policy requiring homes to accept potentially contagious patients who had tested positive for COVID. The New York Times reported late last week that Malatras and several other senior advisers to Cuomo reworked the health department's July report, and that a decision was made to remove the hospital deaths for fear the complete numbers would be an embarrassment for the governor.