New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is on the cusp of losing his Emergency Powers after it was revealed that his Administration lied about the numbers of COVID deaths attributed to long term care facilities. Although the overall state death toll numbers were accurate, the issue that is creating tensions in the political ranks in New York is that the underreporting of nursing home related deaths led to the continuation of the Cuomo policy that allowed COVID positive patients to return to the facilities with our country's most at-risk group of people.

While New York was admitting patients back into nursing homes, the Walz administration was doing the same thing here in Minnesota. In fact, earlier in the pandemic, 80% of COVID related deaths were coming from long term care facilities. And Walz just allowed them to go right in.

On March 25th, Governor Walz issued a statewide order that quarantined healthy young people in their homes. He also shut down large portions of our economy and infringed on religious rights by prohibiting churches from gathering. On top of that, he shut down schools until the end of the school year. Citing a policy of "15 days to slow the spread", with an objective to save the more at-risk populations, the media praised Walz for his actions. To this day, there have been no COVID deaths among the 10-19 year old age group in Minnesota. However, there is skyrocketing levels of depression and suicide.

While the economy was crashing and thousands of Minnesotans were losing the businesses they put their lives into creating, we knew that our elderly population was the most at-risk demographic, especially those who were in nursing homes which have a median lifespan of just under 6 months. Both Cuomo and Walz shut down their state economies under the guise of stopping young people from spreading the virus to grandma and grandpa. After all, if college students met for a beer, caught the virus, then went to see grandma, we'd have a real issue.

Meanwhile, the policy of moving COVID positive patients into nursing homes continued on. Walz even doubled down and stated on May 27th that it "was not a mistake" to transfer patients from hospitals to the long term care facilities. He eventually shut down Minnesota's economy again in mid November and banned us from visiting other people's homes. Once again, his rationale for the policy was to stop young, asymptomatic individuals from spreading the virus to the elderly. To this date, nearly 70% of all Minnesota deaths still come from nursing homes.

Although Walz' COVID response lacks a high profile admission of "fudging the numbers", the fact remains that Walz and Cuomo's policy were the same and had terrible results for our country's most vulnerable community. But they used their self-declared powers along the way to destroy businesses and harm the mental health of our youth. Now we are approaching the one year anniversary of Walz' unilateral declaration of emergency powers and he has no intention of giving them up.

Action 4 Liberty continues to lead the fight in Minnesota to End Walz' Emergency Powers. Learn what we are doing to solve it. Simply put, we MUST stop Walz' assault on our civil liberties and our economy; and restore our democratic process where the legislature creates the laws in this state, not one man.

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