Days after being sworn into office following the resignation of Andrew Cuomo, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has revealed that the state’s Covid-19 death toll includes 12,000 more lives lost to the disease than had previously been reported by her predecessor.

       The state reports that nearly 55,400 New Yorkers have died from Covid-19, spiking the death toll of 43,400 that Mr Cuomo’s administration reported in his final hours in office.

       “We’re now releasing more data than had been released before publicly, so people know the nursing home deaths and the hospital deaths are consistent with what’s being displayed by the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention],” Ms Hochul told MSNBC on 25 August. “There’s just a lot of things that weren’t happening, and I’m gonna make them happen.”

       The governor has sought to include underreported deaths that the previous administration had excluded, creating a discrepancy between the CDC’s reports and information publicised by Mr Cuomo’s office, which excluded Covid-19 patients who died at home, in hospice care or state-run settings.

       More follows...