The downfall of Andrew Cuomo

that wasn’t great. i’m not sure that misleading led to more deaths though. i’d need to know that it led to more deaths for it to matter.

hard to say if his ego is just that huge to believe that women are actually okay with it.

Concurring here. If it was like, a hug given to somebody that made them uncomfortable, meh. I’ve only ever hugged coworkers who are good friends, but okay. Asking questions about your subordinates’ sex lives and kissing them? Get out, you’re done.

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If I make a horrible decision but I obscure the results such that it just looks like a bad decision that’s pretty bad on a whole other level imo.

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hmmmm, yeah, i suppose if we fuck something up at work, there is a policy there for mistake reporting and it doesn’t involve hiding it. okay, maybe he should resign over that. he won’t though. i think the thing with women will hurt him more.

still would have to think through whether his hiding it is resign worthy. the people would have died either way.

does revealing the actual location of the deaths lead to less deaths? that’s my question. probably not. what led to less deaths was reversing the bad policy.

No that’s what makes the decision so horrible. These people were in hospital with COVID. Cuomo (with guidance) was terrified hospitals were going to be overrun so he sent these sick people back to the nursing home where they subsequently infected other residents of the nursing home who weren’t sick and many of those died. If they’d just left the people in the hospital, or waited until some sort of capacity concern hit, all these other people wouldn’t have died.

He lied about how many of these extra people died to make it seem like the decision was less impactful.

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I don’t. I could accept a bad decision that led to more deaths. Big mistakes happen.

Lying about people dying is completely unacceptable though. Lying about anything major should cause you to be fired or jailed.

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i wasn’t clear there. i meant did his lying lead to more deaths. the decision to put recovering patients in nursing homes certainly did.

anyway, i think the lying could have potentially led to more deaths if other states followed his lead since he claimed in a book that ny did so fantastically in controlling this virus. so in that way, the lying is destructive all by itself. he also pat himself and ny on the back a little too much during press briefings.

So you’d hand wave away the lying because the lie itself didn’t cause more deaths? That seems very forgiving.

If I commit fraud the lying about the losses didn’t cause the losses so why is the SEC giving me a hard time?

I already justified how his lying could have caused harm and probably should have led to him being removed from office, so not sure why you’re continuing to argue.

probably because the act of committing fraud hurts people too. that’s why i needed to justify that the lie itself can have a negative consequence.

IMO, we punish liars so that we don’t have liars in charge. Not because any given lie is harmful. Liars are bad. I don’t want them in charge of anything. I’d rather a guy that smells like cat urine.

(That said, I realize that society is weirdly forgiving of liars.)

Opinion piece that references “the myth of the male bumbler”, and claims that is incompatible with Cuomo’s public persona.

Beside using for admittedly political purposes a metric on nursing home deaths that was clearly an outlier, Cuomo aides inserted a liability shield law for hospital and nursing home executives into the budget legislation last year. Guess who were a big political donor group?

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most politicians lie though. have to consider if the lie is harmful. i think i have convinced myself that this one was potentially harmful.

Politicians lie, to some extent or another, but not about everything and not all the time. They have lines that they don’t cross (with the exception of Trump). Changing the underlying data is a line that most politicians would not cross.

Yeah, there’s a pretty big gulf there.

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So… There’s no question now, looking back at it, that Cuomo’s decision to send people with covid out of the hospitals and into nursing homes was a terrible decision, that is largely responsible for the enormous covid mortality NY suffered early in the pandemic. And I think it’s horrible that he hasn’t APOLOGIZED for effectively killing an awful lot of people.

That being said, it’s not clear that he had any reason to know it was the wrong decision at the time. Both the CDC and the WHO were saying the COVID was spread by large droplets and fomites (surfaces) and that’s a form of risk that can be managed. (that’s where the stupid 6 foot rule came from.) Both the CDC and the WHO were really slow to admit that COVID appeared the spread via aerosols, which are much harder to control. If it really had been mostly spread by large droplets and fomites, it might well have saved lives to keep the hospitals open for the most seriously ill while moving the less seriously ill back to nursing homes.

Yes, he should own the decision. And he should abjectly apologize to the families. But I’m not sure he should resign for making what looked like a reasonable decision based on the official medical guidance available to him.

The Japanese have done much better in large part because they ignored the WHO. They observed that covid was behaving as if it were spread by aerosols, and they very quickly switch from dumb messages like “don’t spend more than 15 minutes closer than 6 feet” to "avoid the 3 Cs,

Closed spaces (lack of ventilation)
Crowded places (lots of people)
Close-contact settings (such as close range conversations)

The US is STILL wasting money on “deep cleaning” of surfaces while doing little to improve ventilation, when there’s now tons of evidence that ventilation matters more.

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As others have pointed out, it’s one thing to make a suboptimal decision based on inaccurate intelligence. That’s a very forgivable mistake.

It’s quite another thing to falsify records.

Put it into actuary terms: I’m guessing a lot of life and medical actuaries underestimated their 2020 claims costs in their forecasts and when setting reserves.

That’s completely forgivable. They didn’t know that Covid was going to wreak havoc on their claim costs and they made what seemed like reasonable decisions based on the evidence they had.

But if those same actuaries went back and falsified their actual 2020 claim costs when putting together 2020 financial reporting and when estimating 2021 claim costs to save face then they would be in front of the ABCD and very much at risk of losing their credentials.