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

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 lives might not have been lost except for these tragic policies.”

https://nypost.com/2020/05/01/cuomos-coronavirus-nursing-home-policies-a-disaster-ex-gov-pataki/