The administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio (D-New York City) has stopped publishing data about Coronavirus test results on the Agency Web site of NYC Health. Some testing data was published was on Monday, when the positivity results for multiple New York City zip codes approached 15 per cent., according to a tweet sent by Councilmember Mark Levine (D-Morningside Heights). Monday was also the first day of return for over 50,000 public high school students for in-person learning. But delays in the full reporting of testing data reportedly began as of Sunday, according to a social media post.
According to social media posts, the Agency Web site has been announcing, since Sunday, a “Data Delay,” explaining that, “Due to delays in receiving and processing data from New York State, some data from the past week will be lower than expected. Data for those days will be updated when we receive it.”
A request made to the City Hall press office was not answered, and a spokesperson for Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-New York) would not address the blame game in the City Agency Web site’s message. In recent weeks, Mayor de Blasio has attacked Gov. Cuomo in the press, calling him to step down due to a sexual harassment scandal, mocking him over the size of his hands, and asking him to slow down the economic reopening due to the uncontrollable pandemic.
Mayor de Blasio’s withholding of COVID-19 testing data, and the lack of any explanation from Gov. Cuomo’s office for how the City Agency Web site blamed the State Government for the delays, comes at a time when the Federal Government is reportedly investigating the Cuomo administration for undercounting COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes. Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo have been under pressure to reopen the economy in order to encourage economic activity for their big business donors and to fund Government operations. To some extent, the Government executives have also used reopening announcements to quell criticism from the public and the press. Whereas, in other pandemic hotspots, like France, the Government there has opted for another confinement order to deal with evolving variants of the virus, the lack of vaccines, and the shortcomings of the vaccines, Democrats in the United States have faced pressure to open schools and travel, two sectors that provide day care for working parents and tourism for the service industry-focused economy, respectively.
Today's COVID indicators show that de Blasio is juking the stats of the recovery for all of us.
