The FBI and the US Attorney’s office in Brooklyn are investigating Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s coronavirus task force for its management of nursing homes and long-term care facilities during the pandemic, the Albany Times Union reports.
The US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, along with the FBI, are looking into senior members of the task force after the governor’s office admitted that data about nursing home deaths from COVID did not accurately reflect the spread of the disease at the facilities.
“As we publicly said, DOJ has been looking into this for months,” Richard Azzopardi, a spokesman for the governor, told the Times Union. “We have been cooperating with them and we will continue to.”
The Cuomo administration issued an order early in the pandemic that nursing homes and long-term care facilities must accept residents who were discharged from hospitals even if they still tested positive for coronavirus. The caveat was that the facilities had to have services in place that could take care of those patients.
The re-entry of patients into these locations likely caused a spread of the coronavirus to vulnerable populations in those facilities, many of whom died after contracting the disease.