Through the spring and summer, as President Trump essentially ignored the coronavirus, NYGovCuomo played a kind of alternate-reality president for information-hungry liberals nationwide. He spoke with dwallacewells
Photo: Bobby Doherty Ten months since China acknowledged the first outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan, and seven months since the WHO declared it a global pandemic, there’s nowhere on the planet that’s been hit harder than New York State, where almost 33,000 people have died, most of them during a terrifying surge in March and April. This week, Governor Andrew Cuomo publishes American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Twenty percent is a lot of exposure. So why was it so bad here? You were criticized for moving too slowly, but you went from the first confirmed case to announcing a shutdown in 19 days — much faster than the West Coast states. You had inadequate testing capacity, but so did everyone else in the country.
Do you think it would have been politically feasible for Trump to enact a global travel ban as early as late January?The first point about COVID, I think, and the transcendent point, is it’s shown our nation’s lack of capacity to manage major situations requiring a unified response and a competent government. COVID is a health episode, but you have social crises that you have to respond to, criminal-justice reform.
In 19 days. And these are New Yorkers, right? We had heard about cases in China, heard about cases in California and Seattle, but New Yorkers, there is a certain parochialism for New Yorkers — it’s not real until it happens here. Right? Well, there are cases in Seattle, I know, but that’s far away. But I wonder what different policy approach you would build on that knowledge. Even today, knowing that asymptomatics contribute so significantly to the spread of the disease, we’re still basically testing only symptomatic people.
Going back to the spring and what we could have done differently, I assume you wish also that we had been earlier to understand the preventative role that masks would play as well. Right? You almost couldn’t imagine a more dramatic or explicit failure of federal leadership. Yet I look around, especially at our peer countries in Europe, and I see the U.S. has fared poorly compared with most of our peer countries but not categorically worse in deaths per million, for instance. Outside the countries of East and Southeast Asia, there are very few success stories anywhere.
Well, here’s what I’ll never know. It’s misleading to say you could have done anything just by establishing a government policy. Government couldn’t do any of these things on its own. They had to be socially accepted.
Yes. Surgeon general tweets there’s no reason to wear a mask, leave it to health-care officials. Now, in light of all of that, I’m saying “Wear a mask.” But you have the president of the United States saying it’s bullshit. You have the surgeon general saying it’s nonsense. You’re having Fauci saying it’s not worth it. So this is not in a vacuum, and I can’t announce a policy that people reject or don’t wholeheartedly accept.
Let me give you one other first-perspective mistake, if I could have done it over again. You now have Trump telling Woodward he knew what was happening, right?Which is sort of an interesting parallel because, if this is true what they’re saying today, that he had a test 72 hours ago, which is what the doctor said today, that means he knew he was positive, and he did the whole day of campaigning in New Jersey after they knew he was positive.
Could you have done anything to prevent that from happening? Could you have intervened, claiming that authority at the state level? Well, we have. We have state guidance. We say, “There has to be distancing. There has to be masks. There has to be a testing regimen.” But then the localities design the exact plan to do that with their parents and with their teachers.Well, I think anyone would say what’s important is public confidence, the demonstration of capacity. So come up with a plan that is accepted and you can execute.
It’s a $50 billion deficit. It’s the highest in the history of the state. The question is normally: Do you raise taxes, or cut expenses, or do you borrow? Here there is no “or”; it would be “and.” You’d have to cut expenses and tax and borrow. And you would hurt the economy. And you would hurt the city, more so.
To stay on the MTA for a second, as a case study going forward, what do we need to do to solve that problem to make it a public service that endures, providing the kind of service New Yorkers have come to expect?
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