The New York Times has made it abundantly clear that even in the face of massive nursing home death tolls, aided and abetted by the policies of Democrats like Cuomo, Murphy, Whitmer, Newsom, which pursued the lockdown model of clearing out space in hospitals by dumping coronavirus patients into nursing homes, the media will keep on pushing the lockdown lie.

Here’s the latest lie.

If the United States had begun imposing social distancing measures one week earlier than it did in March, about 36,000 fewer people would have died in the coronavirus outbreak, according to new estimates from Columbia University disease modelers.

Ah more models. We can never get enough garbage models.

And if the country had begun locking down cities and limiting social contact on March 1, two weeks earlier than most people started staying home, the vast majority of the nation’s deaths — about 83 percent — would have been avoided, the researchers estimated.

Under that scenario, about 54,000 fewer people would have died by early May.

54,000 people, 36,000 people. Those are big numbers.

Even small differences in timing would have prevented the worst exponential growth, which by April had subsumed New York City, New Orleans and other major cities, the researchers found.

After Italy and South Korea had started aggressively responding to the virus, President Trump resisted canceling campaign rallies or telling people to stay home or avoid crowds. The risk of the virus to most Americans was very low, he said.

“Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on,” Mr. Trump tweeted on March 9, suggesting that the flu was worse than the coronavirus. “At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”

What does any of this have to do with New York, where the leadership, including Bill de Blasio and Andy Cuomo were resisting shutdowns, and where New York City’s Health boss was telling people to go to Chinatown and see the parade.

In the New York metro area alone, 21,800 people had died by May 3. Fewer than 4,300 would have died by then if control measures had been put in place and adopted nationwide just a week earlier, on March 8, the researchers estimated.

That would be quite a trick considering the number of nursing home deaths. Access to nursing homes was already restricted. They were locked down. But I’m sure these folks would still be alive if Team Lockdown had locked up more healthy people.

At the 268-bed Cypress Garden Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in Flushing, 76 patients died from March 1 through May 2, including 68 in April alone, according to internal documents seen by The Post.

The state tally is just seven deaths.

Department of Health inspectors visited the home this week and the probe is ongoing, the agency said.

At Coney Island’s 360-bed Seagate Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, 74 patients died through May 1. The state tally is 25.

If only we had locked up more healthy people and sent more infected people to nursing homes…