Time to Drop the 'Murderer' Rhetoric / Where is the outrage about Trump

 "All crimes matter. Enough with this DEI crap you grandma killer"

"Will any seniors be killed during the broadcast?"

I'm sick of this.  Every time Andrew Cuomo posts on social media, the unintelligent and uncaring come out of the woodwork to spread their hatred instead of just going about their business.  I will try to explain this in small words so that everyone understands. (And this will be gone over later in great detail.)

Nursing homes in this country have been a mess for decades—long before anyone ever heard of COVID. We're talking chronic understaffing, neglect, abuse, preventable falls and infections, overmedication, and residents living in places that feel more like warehouses than homes. Reports going back to the 1980s laid it all out: facilities cutting corners to save money, staff stretched too thin to provide basic care, and vulnerable people paying the price with their health and dignity. Those problems never really got fixed. Reforms came and went, but the core issues—profit-driven decisions, weak oversight, and not enough investment in better options—stayed the same.

When the pandemic hit, everything got exposed in the worst way. Hospitals were drowning, and they had to get stable patients out fast to make room for the sick ones. Nursing homes were the default place to send them, even when those facilities weren't ready—no proper isolation, short on PPE, already short-staffed. Sending recovering or positive patients there risked spreading the virus to the most fragile people imaginable. But keeping them in hospitals longer would have collapsed the whole system and cost even more lives. It was a brutal, no-good-choice situation.

People tried other ideas—field hospitals like Javits, the Comfort ship, designated COVID hubs in some states—but those were mostly downstate or in smaller places where geography made them workable. Up here in Rochester or Watertown, those options were hundreds of miles away and didn't help at all. Warehousing folks in some empty building or convention center? That would have been a nightmare too—dehumanizing, medically inadequate, and probably would have sparked huge outrage from families and advocates. Every path forward looked like a lose-lose.

The finger-pointing came hard, especially at Andrew Cuomo, with some people calling him a murderer over the nursing home policies and the messy data reporting. But that kind of label oversimplifies a chaotic crisis where nobody had perfect answers. The March 2020 directive to take patients back was rescinded later, and criticized undercounting by excluding hospital deaths of nursing home residents from facility-specific tallies (leading to initial figures appearing lower, with totals later revised upward significantly) was resolved.

No charges ever stuck because it wasn't that simple. The real story is systemic failure—decades of neglect in long-term care, rushed emergency decisions, and not enough planning or resources to handle a disaster like this without hurting vulnerable people.

Blaming one person lets the bigger problems off the hook. Nursing homes are still structurally broken today—still understaffed, still profit-focused in too many cases, still not set up to handle isolation or emergencies well. What we actually need is real change: more money and support for home- and community-based care so people can age in place safely, stronger staffing rules that stick, better oversight, and less reliance on institutions that have failed residents for generations. The crisis showed us how bad things were; it didn't create the problems—it just made them impossible to ignore.

Where is the outrage about this: