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Texas Lt. Gov. hits back at Cuomo for ‘mocking’ rising COVID cases

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Dan Patrick isn’t taking a lecture from Andrew Cuomo — not on nursing homes, not on anything.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick went on Fox News on June 25, 2020, and torched New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo after Cuomo publicly warned other states, “Don’t be like Texas,” while framing the South’s case surge as the price of reopening too fast. Patrick didn’t dodge — he went straight at Cuomo’s nursing home record and called him “probably the biggest fraud” of all 50 governors.

• Cuomo announced a 14-day quarantine order for travelers arriving in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut from high-infection states, including Texas.
• Patrick fired back: “We don’t need your help. Remember you’re the governor who killed 11,000 seniors in nursing homes,” referencing Cuomo’s directive allowing recovering COVID-19 patients back into nursing home facilities.
• The clash came as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott paused the state’s phased reopening and suspended elective surgeries in Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio to protect ICU capacity.

Cuomo’s Warning Sets Off the Fight

Cuomo had spent days casting the surge across southern and Republican-led states as a self-inflicted wound — the predictable result, in his telling, of governors reopening early and ignoring public health warnings. His line, “Don’t be like Texas,” was less a policy critique than a public shaming, and it landed at a moment when Texas hospitals were already filling up. Cuomo backed the rhetoric with action, ordering a 14-day quarantine for travelers coming into New York, New Jersey and Connecticut from states with high infection rates, Texas among them.

For Patrick, that combination — the mockery plus the travel order — was the trigger. He didn’t treat it as a health directive worth debating on the merits. He treated it as an attack from someone he considers uniquely unqualified to give advice, and he said so on air.

Patrick’s Nursing Home Counterpunch

Patrick’s response didn’t touch case counts or hospitalization curves at all. He went straight for New York’s early nursing home policy, which allowed COVID-positive patients to be sent back into long-term care facilities during the spring peak — a decision that had already drawn sustained criticism over the state’s elder-care death toll.

“We don’t need your help. Remember you’re the governor who killed 11,000 seniors in nursing homes.”

Patrick paired that line with the “biggest fraud” jab, rejecting the idea that New York’s early spring mortality numbers gave Cuomo any standing to lecture Texas on pandemic management. His argument, in short: judge outcomes, not press conferences — and by that measure, he said, Texas had nothing to apologize for to New York.

The Backdrop: Texas Was Already Pulling Back

The Fox News clash didn’t happen in a vacuum. Texas was in the middle of its own reckoning with the virus, recording historic spikes in new diagnoses and hospital admissions through late June 2020. Just as Patrick was on air defending the state’s record, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas would pause its phased economic reopening and suspend elective surgeries in the state’s largest metro areas — Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio — specifically to preserve ICU bed capacity.

That timing mattered. Patrick and Texas leadership were pushing back hard on Cuomo’s criticism even as the state’s own numbers validated part of what Cuomo was warning about. Patrick’s position wasn’t that Texas had no problem — it was that New York, given its own nursing home death toll during the spring peak, had disqualified itself from playing scold. The dispute fits into a broader pattern of governors trading blame as the country’s case totals kept climbing past 3.1 million, and it echoed similar friction playing out as several states moved to reimpose restrictions that same week.

Abbott’s pause on elective surgeries in Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio wasn’t a reversal of reopening — it was a specific, targeted move to keep ICU beds available while cases climbed. That’s the number to watch heading into July: how much room Texas hospitals have left, and whether Abbott has to go further than pausing elective procedures if admissions keep climbing the way they did in the last week of June.