Is this the end for New York’s Democratic darling?

In a matter of two weeks, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s reputation has slid from that of smug Emmy Award winner to mastermind of a cover-up of Covid-19 deaths in New York nursing homes.

The state’s political world was rocked earlier this month when Michelle DeRosa, the governor’s top aide, was recorded telling state legislators that the Cuomo administration had stonewalled their demand for the real number of nursing-home deaths.

DeRosa admitted that ‘basically, we froze’ out of fear of a US Justice Department investigation into how thousands of nursing home patients had died. A ProPublica investigation had found that Cuomo’s 25 March mandate that state nursing homes admit coronavirus patients was akin to ‘introducing fire to dry grass’. An investigation by the state’s Democratic attorney general found that the real numbers boosted the official nursing-home death toll by more than 50 per cent, to what is now a total of 13,432. New York State only has some 100,000 patients in nursing homes.