New Yorkers mourn loved ones who died from COVID-19 in nursing homes
New Yorkers gathered in Brooklyn on Sunday to mourn loved ones lost to COVID-19 in nursing homes — and to rip Gov. Cuomo for his handling of the outbreak and dubious death-toll reporting at the facilities.
Dozens of people gathered on Henry Street in Cobble Hill, where they posted photos of lost family members on a makeshift memorial wall and carried signs with messages such as, “We will never forget.”
Tracey Alvino spoke to the crowd about the last days of her father, Daniel, 76, one of the more than 15,000 nursing-home residents who died in confirmed or presumed cases of COVID-19.
“He is one of Gov. Cuomo’s uncounted,” she said, referring to the state’s underreporting of coronavirus fatalities among residents of nursing homes and assisted-living centers.
Alvino then gave a bitter nod to top Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa, who was caught on tape in February admitting that the administration had intentionally obscured the resident death toll because it feared a federal probe.
“He may be just a number to Melissa DeRosa that she omitted from her report, but to my family, he was the glue that kept us together,” Alvino said of her dad.
Cuomo had allegedly hid the nursing-home death toll while facing scrutiny over a directive issued by his Health Department on March 25, 2020, that barred nursing homes from turning away people on the sole basis of a coronavirus diagnosis.
The widely criticized edict came as the governor publicly likened the potential spread of the virus in nursing homes to “a fire through dry grass.”
On Sunday, Alvino recalled making the heart-wrenching decision to let her father die as he lay intubated from his battle against the virus, which he caught while recuperating from neck surgery in a nursing home.
“It might sound cruel, but I have to give it to you straight: Your father is a dying man,” she recalled her dad’s doctor telling her by phone at the height of the pandemic in April 2020.
“I never knew the name of that doctor. I don’t even know his face,” Alvino said. “Because of COVID-19, I had to make the decision to let my father go over the phone, with a doctor I didn’t know.”
Daniel Alvino had signed a do-not-resuscitate order before he was intubated, but as he fought for his life, it was his daughter who had to make a judgment call on what she thought he would have wanted.
“The decision still haunts me to this day, but it had to be made,” Tracey Alvino said. “At that point, he had been on the ventilator for COVID-19 pneumonia for nine days, and every day was more grim than the one that preceded it.”
Daniel Alvino died April 14.
His daughter said she spoke on Sunday both to pay tribute to her father and to demand accountability for his death from the governor.
“Us grieving families don’t want an apology, and we don’t want to break bread with Gov. Cuomo. I don’t even want to hear his voice at this point, to be perfectly honest with you,” she told those gathered. “We want answers, accountability and justice.”
Also speaking at the event was state Assemblyman Ron Kim, who has openly criticized the governor throughout the pandemic and whose uncle, retired Army Capt. Son Kim, was a nursing-home resident claimed by COVID-19.
“If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here,” Kim said of his uncle. “I came here at the age of 7 from South Korea, and it was him that sponsored our papers so we could be here.”
Kim, a Queens Democrat, drew chuckles from the crowd as he recalled his Republican uncle’s love of President Ronald Reagan.
“It was 1987, I remember the Mets had just won the World Series. I like to tell people that I was named after [pitcher] Ron Darling,” Kim said. “But the truth is, my uncle wasn’t just a US Army captain, he was actually one of the first Republican Korean Americans in the city of New York.
“You don’t have to clap for that,” the Democrat joked as applause broke out among the crowd. “He was a big fan of Ronald Reagan at the time. So he named me after Ronald Reagan, not Ron Darling.”
Kim has said that after The Post exclusively reported DeRosa’s February remarks, Cuomo called him and warned that Kim’s political future would be “destroyed” unless he backed the administration’s accounting.
Cuomo has denied threatening Kim in the call.
“When I got that call from Gov. Cuomo threatening me and my career, my livelihood, to lie for him, I wasn’t scared of his bully tactics,” Kim said on Sunday. “But I was afraid that he would escape accountability.”
“Who in their right mind can go into a press conference and say, ‘Who cares where they died?’ ” Kim said, referring to a January press briefing in which Cuomo downplayed the extent of the COVID-19 toll. “Who talks like that about older adults?
“A coward. One hundred percent a coward. An abuser. Someone who abuses their power would say that,” Kim added. “So we’ve had enough. We will mourn. We will hold hands. We will share our traumas. But we will get to a just place.”
The federal Justice Department is probing the Cuomo administration’s accounting methods over the deaths, and the fuzzy math may also feature in an ongoing state investigation as a possible prelude to the governor’s impeachment.
“Together, decency will win,” Kim said. “And that’s why I know, I know that this governor will be held accountable. That I know that his reign of abusive power will end soon. Because there are way too many decent people in the city of New York to let this guy go unchecked.”