New governor of New York adds 12,000 deaths to publicized COVID tally

New York Governor Kathy Hochul promised more government transparency on her first day in office, and by day's end her administration had quietly acknowledged nearly 12,000 more deaths in the state from COVID-19 than had been publicized by her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo.

New York now reports nearly 55,400 people have died of COVID-19 in New York, based on death certificate data submitted to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, up from about 43,400 that Cuomo had reported to the public as of Monday, his last day 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 CDC," Hochul said Wednesday on MSNBC. "There's a lot of things that weren't happening and I'm going to make them happen. Transparency will be the hallmark of my administration."