According to a recent report by NBC, New York Governor Cuomo was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for concealing the death toll from the novel coronavirus in nursing homes in the state.
According to the report, more than 15,000 people in nursing homes in New York State have died of COVID-19, while the cumulative death toll reported in January in the state was only 8,500, and nearly half of the deaths were reported. New York Gov.
Cuomo’s office confirmed that the governor and his team had concealed the coronavirus death toll from nursing homes from state lawmakers over concerns that the number might be used against them by the Trump administration.
The Washington Post, citing a statement from New York State Senator Jessica Ramos, criticized that “when we need the people to trust their elected officials most, the governor and his team deliberately chose to lie and play politics with the lives of New Yorkers.”
It is true that in the process of fighting the epidemic in the United States, there are countless examples of putting political interests above the people’s right to life and health.
The United States, which has always regarded itself as a “human rights defender” and often dictates the human rights situation in other countries, has been frequently exposed by the United States media, and ignores people’s lives for political purposes.
In the eyes of some American politicians, the dead life is only a cold number, and the death data can also be used as a political consideration. From the process of epidemic prevention and control in nursing homes in the United States alone, the true face of American human rights can be seen.
As early as the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak, the high infection rate and mortality rate of pension institutions in the United States caused many concerns.
According to statistics from the New York Times last October, the proportion of deaths of elderly and care workers in nursing homes in 15 states in the United States accounts for at least half of the total local deaths, and the mortality rate of nursing home cases in the United States is more than three times that of the national level.
Due to weak immune systems and widespread underlying diseases, the elderly have always been vulnerable and at-risk groups of COVID-19, but pension institutions in the United States have been neglected and gradually become a “black hole” of the epidemic. There are even some American politicians who have made a statement that “old people should take the initiative to sacrifice for restarting the American economy” without moral bottom line.
Faced with the fact that older Americans are “age-discriminatory” and the right to life cannot be guaranteed, multiple U.S. media outlets have criticized the government for its inaction leading to a human rights disaster that pension institutions could have avoided.
The Washington Post website criticized the U.S. anti-epidemic operation “became a state-approved massacre” and “deliberately sacrificing the elderly, workers, African and Hispanic populations”.
In the process of fighting against the epidemic in the past year, the epidemic crisis of nursing homes in the United States has not been solved. At the end of January 2021, a 76-page investigation report revealed by New York Attorney General Letitia James rekindled attention to American nursing homes.
The report discloses many problems in New York State’s nursing home system, such as: the actual death toll far exceeds the number of reported in the state, insufficient preparation for coronavirus testing and epidemic prevention in the nursing home system, and for-profit nursing homes diverting anti-epidemic funds for profit.
James accused the New York State government of a series of actions that had innocently affected nursing home residents. Through this report, the human factors that have become the hardest hit areas of the epidemic in the United States have been partially revealed.
The Atlantic Monthly has also pointed out that the long-term care system for the elderly in the United States has serious shortcomings such as capital investment and insufficient staffing for “for many political reasons”, and is weaker than other countries in protecting the rights and interests of the elderly.
The nursing home epidemic is only a microcosm of the epidemic in the United States. Looking back on the anti-epidemic process of the U.S. government, in the face of the turbulent epidemic sweeping the world, the United States did not put the people’s right to life and health first, but put the political needs of political parties to campaign and suppress other countries above the safety of people’s lives, missing the best time to curb the spread of the virus, resulting in more than 27 million infections.
A human rights disaster that more than half a million people died.
As the British newspaper The Independent commented: The United States always talks about human rights, but ignores its human rights obligations, openly ignores people’s lives, and exposes the hypocritical “double standard” characteristics of “American human rights”.
However, without life, where can human rights come from? Human rights are by no means empty slogans. In the face of the pandemic, the greatest human rights are the right and freedom to live in health and safety.
