Read on Twitter
Even if every claim in this NYT editorial regarding Federal dereliction and private sector “corruption” as true, the editorial still is the ultimate in erasure: literally not a word about many governors’ policy of returning COVID patients to nursing homes. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/05/opinion/sunday/coronavirus-nursing-homes-deaths.html?referringSource=articleShare
This is the one policy decision about which it can be said that there was an available alternative and making the wrong choice cost literally thousands of lives. We know this because Cuomo, Murphy & Whitmer made one choice & DeSantis chose the opposite.
And just pointing that out makes it obvious why the editorial did not mention that one policy when spraying fire in the direction of all other related policies.
It’s unknowable whether that was due to a bias-driven blind spot or Krugman-esque narrative selection, but as a former Secretary of State once said,’”in the end, what difference does it make?”
I’m generally a fatalist when it comes to COVID policy, come to believe that many policy choices don’t make nearly as much difference as we’d like to believe. with a few major exceptions. One of which is “don’t send COVID patients back to nursing homes.”
I expect this ignoring of all relevant evidence that doesn’t fit the narrative from Krugman, but I’d expect better from the NYT editorial board...who am I kidding, this is exactly what I’d have expected from them. (Even before the Tom Cotton-driven regime change.)
But it’s not just the editorialists. Remember that puff piece in the NYT Mag on Gretchen Whitmer? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/magazine/gretchen-whitmer-coronavirus-michigan.html Not a word about her policy of sending COVID patients back to nursing homes.
In a piece devoted to her decisiveness and devotion to the evidence, not a word about her sticking with an empirically disastrous decision longer than any other governor.
Just to wrap up: blue state governors & mayors often take unfair criticism for the elevated COVID death tolls in their states. Even - and it pains me to type this - de Blasio.
Much of the death toll was due to factors out of their control and many of this choices were made in absence of better ones.
But here, we have pretty close to THE ONE THING that was within their control and there were better alternative choices available. And in a long editorial about nursing home’s death toll, that is THE ONE THING the NYT doesn’t mention. Not even in a “to be sure” aside.
That’s a pretty categorical miss. Tom Cotton’s work is not complete.
