In a reminder of just how bad ex-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo really was, one of the first acts of his replacement, Kathy Hochul, was restating the number of New Yorkers who died from COVID-19…increasing the total from 43,400 to 55,400.

Why the change? As Reason’s Liz Wolfe writes:

Cuomo chose to tout, in his Emmy Award–winning briefings (no longer!), a state death toll that only included lab-confirmed COVID cases for those who died in hospitals, nursing homes, and residential adult-care facilities. It did not include people who died at home, in prisons, in residential homes for people with disabilities, or in hospice care. It also did not include people who most likely died of COVID, but did not officially test positive. Experts estimate there were roughly 5,000 of those types of cases in New York City alone, in part due to the fact that since New York was hit hard before testing capacity had been built out, it was difficult to get a confirmed result.

Regardless, Cuomo’s creative accounting involved a great deal of cherry-picking that made it so that the keen observer—or, frankly, even a dullard—when comparing state health department data and official CDC data would have been left confused by the discrepancy: The state reported more deaths to the CDC, which were then reflected in the agency’s data, than the state was willing to show on its own dashboards or in Cuomo’s briefings.

Cuomo was massaging the data – bad political and personal behavior no matter how it’s framed.

And about Cuomo’s Emmy Award…that embarrassing spasm of Hollywood dizziness has been sent down the memory hole:

…now that Mr. Cuomo has been run out of office over sexual-harassment allegations, the International Academy that bestows the celebrity prizes wants to pretend its partisan sycophancy never happened. On Tuesday it rescinded the award granted only nine months ago, replacing the announcement page on its website with a notice that Mr. Cuomo’s “name and any reference to his receiving the award will be eliminated from International Academy materials going forward.”

How nice.