Five years after the pandemic, Andrew Cuomo is still gaslighting New Yorkers about how many people died in nursing homes.

The latest example came during the mayoral debate. When challenged about his handling of COVID in nursing homes, Cuomo cited what has become his favorite statistic:

“When you look at the total death toll in New York, the rate of death in nursing homes, we’re No. 38 out of 50 states,” he declared. “Only 12 states had a lower rate of death than New York — which is incredible in my opinion, since we had it first and worst.”

That claim really is incredible — because it’s not true.

Cuomo’s boast is based on numbers gathered by the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, a seemingly reliable source. Unfortunately, the agency didn’t start tracking the pandemic in nursing homes until mid-May 2020 — and made it optional for homes to report deaths earlier in the crisis.

As a result, CMS failed to record most of what happened in March, April and early May 2020, which was the deadliest period of New York’s first wave. For all of 2020, CMS counted fewer than 6,000 deaths in the state’s nursing homes, compared to 11,400 tallied by the state’s own Health Department.

Thus Cuomo’s 38-out-of-50 ranking is based on pretending that almost 5,500 deaths didn’t happen. In other words, he’s still falsifying the facts about a public health tragedy.

Properly correcting the ranking isn’t possible because CMS is missing data from other states, too. It’s clear, however, that nearly doubling New York’s 2020 death toll would put it among the worst performers, not the best.

I first called out Cuomo for using bad data in June 2024, when his spokesman quoted the 38-out-of-50 claim to the Albany Times Union. That has not stopped him from repeating it at every opportunity — in TV interviews, podcasts, meetings with editorial boards and both mayoral debates.

He even trumpeted the claim during his testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, bringing a blown-up chart to illustrate his inaccurate point.

Of course, spreading false information about COVID in nursing homes is nothing new for the former governor.

His deceptions on this topic date back to late March 2020, when his administration issued its infamous order compelling nursing homes to accept infected patients being discharged from hospitals.

He and his aides heatedly denied that the order had caused any harm. Yet they also manipulated official reports to make the nursing home death toll look thousands lower than it really was — by omitting residents who had gotten sick in the facilities but died after being transported to hospitals.

For months, Cuomo and his aides refused to share the true toll with the public, the press or the state Legislature. They even removed the accurate death count from a July 2020 Health Department report on the nursing home crisis. Meanwhile, they used the fake numbers to make rosy comparisons with other states — much as Cuomo is still doing today.

The stonewalling continued until early 2021, when Attorney General Letitia James issued a report exposing the undercount and the Empire Center (my employer) won a court ruling that Cuomo had violated the Freedom of Information Law.

At that point, officials finally revealed almost 15,000 New Yorkers had died from COVID in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, which was 6,000 more than Cuomo had previously admitted.

That moment marked the beginning of the end for Cuomo’s governorship. Within a few weeks, the Assembly launched an impeachment probe of his nursing home coverup along with sexual harassment charges and other allegations. Five months later, he resigned to avoid removal from office.

The scandal also led to the House subcommittee investigation — and a formal accusation that he lied to Congress by denying any involvement in rewriting the July 2020 Health Department report, a charge that is reportedly under investigation by the Justice Department.

That Cuomo would still be twisting the facts after all that speaks not just to dishonesty, but a failure to learn from a catastrophic mistake.

Reasonable people can disagree whether the original must-admit order was a defensible decision in the heat of an emergency, or whether it significantly worsened what was already a grim situation in the homes. But there is no doubt that he and his administration spread misinformation about the death toll back then — and he’s doing it again now.

Although dishonesty about the pandemic helped bring Cuomo down in 2021, he apparently believes the same strategy will put him back in public office in 2025. Whether that gambit pays off will be determined by the voters on Primary Day.

This commentary was originally published in the New York Daily News.