Important question. If NY were a country, it would only rank behind Hungary, Gibraltar, and Czechia for the highest death rate. And it has been that way or worse since April 2020, even as other states and countries had their worst problems later on.
NY and the even-worse-faring NJ are denser and therefore likelier to have higher total infection numbers and deaths than the Plains states. So I wouldn't even accuse them of mismanagement except that this nursing home strategy seems to have been a bad one. However I think the story here is how the media chose their favorite son in this (Cuomo) despite him actually being one of the worst performers. And the TV-news-watching public dutifully ate it up despite clearly contrary data being available on the web from Day 1.