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Comment by Fellshard | Hacker News Reader

At this point, do a little introspection. Did you hear about this last year? From who? Did you find it credible? Why or why not? Is there any way you can grow in your consumption of information based on your findings?

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Yes, I heard about it in the first quarter of last year. I heard about it on news sites on the web. I found it credible.

This whole reportage stinks of "We Have Always Been At War With Eastasia" to me at the moment.

We heard about it from the New York AG. The coverup was confirmed by his top aide, Melissa DeRosa.

I'm quite intentionally trying to frame my post in a neutral way to avoid partisan assumptions/squabbles.

The people I named are Democrats, I don't see this as a partisan thing. It's a humanity thing. I'm simply answering your questions of who blew the whistle and how we found out about it.

Introspection. I'm asking each individual to evaluate their own information intake valve. There are objective sources, the question is how and when we accept or dismiss them.

Right back atcha -- because while there are plenty of covid screwups to go around, someone who thinks this one got suppressed probably has an information diet that disproportionately focused attention on this screw up in order to shift attention away from their own screw up, which was orders of magnitude larger.

FTA:

> The effort by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office to obscure the pandemic death toll in New York nursing homes was far greater than previously known, with aides repeatedly overruling state health officials over a span of at least five months, according to interviews and newly unearthed documents.

Sounds like this one got suppressed according to the article.

> someone who thinks this one got suppressed probably has an information diet that disproportionately focused attention on this screw up in order to shift attention away from their own screw up, which was orders of magnitude larger.

This is whataboutism. The article is about Cuomo's bad response to COVID regarding nursing homes.

> Sounds like this one got suppressed

With regard to obscuring the death toll, I agree, and Cuomo needs to be dealt with.

With regard to prioritizing this story against it's competitor, however, I think my information diet got the mix about right, which is to say in proportion to impact.

> This is whataboutism.

If we were just talking about Cuomo, sure -- but you brought up information diets and suppression, which absolutely brings into scope the nonstop 24/7 Republican efforts to use the Cuomo story as whataboutism.

Most of the media was actively praising Cuomo at a time when roughly half of US casualties were in NY. I can’t speak to your media diet in particular, but it’s not like CNN had their Cuomo criticism on page 2 and their Trump criticism on the front page—their Trump criticism and Cuomo praise were both on the metaphorical front page.

What’s the implication here? Anyone with a pulse on moderate or conservative media must be a rabid Trump supporter? What do we gain from this kind of dichotomous thinking?

> Did you hear about this last year? From who? Did you find it credible? Why or why not?

Your questions above propose the idea of bias in the information delivery and reception, which inherently maps to political partisanship. What other sort of bias could your questions possibly evoke?

Cuomo was exposed and has been condemned largely by officials within his own party, and also broadly by the media, whether left, right, or center.

I think what OP is getting at is that it's suspicious that this became a "mainstream" news story this year when it was known last year.

Agreed. I’m a liberal and a democrat but the Dems and the media are not brave whistleblowers for suppressing the truth until the very last politically tenable moment.

> Cuomo was exposed and has been condemned largely by officials within his own party, and also broadly by the media, whether left, right, or center.

Correct, but for the nursing home residents and their families that too little too late. I first read about this last summer as the nursing home rules began to take effect. At the time the party and media were too busy holding Cuomo up as an anti-Trumpian figure. They gave him an Emmy and cute nicknames while this happened. It is all just a little too much for me.

It’s not “Cuomo’s AG”, in NY the attorney general is elected by voters.

Correct, updated. Main point still stands.

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio..., it only became a notable scandal mid-February.

As far as information consumption goes, though, I think if anything I've consumed too much. I don't live in NY and the stuff happening there has no relevance to me.

When people scoff at the source, like when people sniff "but that's on faux news", the report is unlikely to be accepted at face value. This is a major problem, in that real information surfaces on both "political sides" (they aren't really both sides, but that's a discussion for another day) and people discount items that conflict with the particular narrative they believe in.

You can see that here. In the downvotes.

I saw it on Politifact in May/June I believe as he initially blamed the Trump administration and that was found to be false.

Same question can be asked about the undercounts in Florida?

[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/03/florida-covid-19-dea...

Not so sure about that...

https://twitter.com/natesilver538/status/1387096352845225984...

That is a surprisingly bad take from Nate Silver, who I am usually a fan of. The fact that Florida has less excess death than the national average does not preclude systematic undercounting. One can both have lower actual deaths than average and also undercount those deaths.

And the article that I linked to quoted a study that used excess death numbers and compared those to the official counts. That is by far the best method to estimate an undercount.

NPR has been talking about this since January or so. Not exactly a right wing propaganda outlet.

Howie Carr was talking about it around the same period as NPR. For folks outside of New England, he is a right wing radio host but he puts a spin on actual news rather than just making up garbage.

What credible source was talking about this before January?

Right wing media was talking about this last summer. It seems the propaganda was in fact coming from those in the Cuomo administration trying to deflect blame.

I don't remember exactly where I heard it first, but I googled and found this US News & World Report story about it from July 14, 2020:

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-07-14/...

Right wing media has been saying the Covid is just a flu and there was nothing to worry about, and in fact it's the best time to take a flight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o

One has to be crazy to believe anything from the right wing media after things like that which are just a tip of the iceberg of lies they regularly spread. They did it to themselves.

This attitude of yours is why you were on the wrong side of a very important news story during an election year.

Sorry I don't have the time to sift through tons of trash to find one truth nugget.

You just described all of modern news and social media. If you're not already sifting then you're the mark.

Thinking back to who recommended people ignore the presidents concerns[2] at the time and go mingle in public[1].

I know it doesn't jive with the narrative. Neither of these two could be even remotely construed to be "right wing".

[1] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/nancy-pelosi-visits-sa...

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/01/31/8016865...

>What credible source was talking about this before January?

It is probably easier to ask which major news sources were not talking about this prior to January.

You can easily find articles posted prior to January from The Association Press, Fox News, CNN, Daily Wire, NY Post, Daily Mail, Daily Caller, Washington Times, The Federalist, USA Today, etc. Many of those sites had articles back in May.

You are confusing two related but different stories. Back then the talk was about the fact that he sent patients back into nursing homes.

It was only later that we discovered that he actively fudged the numbers by not counting nursing home patients that died in hospitals.

I am not confusing them. There were absolutely articles last year about this (though maybe not as far back as May for this specifically).

Here is an article from the Washington Post back in August 2020

> New York’s coronavirus death toll in nursing homes, already among the highest in the nation, could actually be a significant undercount. Unlike every other state with major outbreaks, New York only counts residents who died on nursing home property and not those who were transported to hospitals and died there.

> That statistic could add thousands to the state’s official care home death toll of just over 6,600. But so far the administration of Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has refused to divulge the number, leading to speculation the state is manipulating the figures to make it appear it is doing better than other states and to make a tragic situation less dire.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/new-yorks-true-nursing...

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