Corona-gate
It’s nuts to praise state’s COVID-19 ‘success’
Amid a statewide death toll that’s the sixth-highest in the world and continuing controversy over his handling of New York’s nursing homes during the crisis, Gov. Cuomo attacked President Trump’s coronavirus response on Monday — calling it worse than Watergate.
During a news conference in Manhattan, Cuomo went on a rant against the president, saying that “Trump’s COVID scandal makes Nixon’s Watergate look innocent.”
“No one died in the Watergate scandal,” he said. “Thousands of people are going to die in this COVID scandal, and that is all the difference in the world.”
Cuomo also showed off a 19th-century-style poster he commissioned to tout the state’s — and his own — efforts at “Pulling Down The Curve Together” through “The Power of ‘We.’ ”
The poster — similar to one he released in January to visually represent his first three terms in office — depicts a mountain outlining the state’s coronavirus caseload.
Various events in the crisis are represented on the mountain, with “NY ‘PAUSE’ Shutdown” near the base, “Mask Up” near the peak and a river of dollar signs labeled “Economy Falls” cascading down its face.
It also features Cuomo at the wheel of his vintage Pontiac GTO as New Yorkers and others — anchored by his pet dog, Captain — pull on a rope that traces the mountain’s outline.
In the upper right-hand corner, Trump watches with his hands in his lap from a perch inside a crescent moon.
“It’s Just The Flu,” reads a caption under Trump.
Meanwhile, the top of the artwork is adorned with a quote from Cuomo: “Wake Up America! Forget the Politics, Get Smart!”
The poster, which includes a timeline of “111 Days of Hell,” notes that while there were 18,825 statewide hospitalizations for COVID-19
on April 12, that number had dropped to 1,220 on June 19.
But there’s no mention of New York’s staggering death toll, which as of Monday was at least 29,604, according to official state and city figures.
That total is the highest by far of any state in the nation and exceeds every other country’s except Brazil’s, the UK’s, Mexico’s, Italy’s and France’s, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Coronavirus Resource Center.
Also at his news conference Monday, Cuomo offered a disjointed defense of the statistics that underpin a state Department of Health report that last week cast blame for nursing-home COVID-19 deaths away from a controversial directive handed down by his administration in March.
The March 25 order, issued by the DOH and since repealed, had required nursing homes to admit “medically stable” coronavirus patients discharged from hospitals and has been blamed for fueling the virus’ devastating spread among nursing-home residents.
But in its own report analyzing state nursing-home data, the DOH pinned the blame instead on nursinghome workers and possibly visitors who unwittingly spread the virus.
Former Cuomo aide Jim Malatras, now president of SUNY Empire State College in Saratoga Springs, said the report “used the publicly reported data” — even though the DOH in early May stopped releasing the number of nursing-home residents who died in hospitals.
Cuomo added that “if the person goes into the hospital and passes away in the hospital, we call that a hospitalization death, as opposed to try and trace every — from how long did a person need to be in a nursing home from a hospital.”
“Or you’d have to do it the other way, back it out of the hospital deaths, increase the nursing home and reduce the hospitalization. But you add the two numbers together — it’s the number,” he added.
Meanwhile, the state Legislature announced a series of joint hearings into the pandemic’s devastating impact, with two sessions dedicated to the “rate of infection and mortality” in residential health-care facilities for the elderly and infirm.
About 6,600 nursinghome residents have died from COVID-19 in the state, according to the latest official figures.
The legislative hearings, which follow bipartisan outrage over the March 25 mandate, are set for Aug. 3 and Aug. 10.
IF only the rest of the country could handle COVID as well as New York: That’s the lament of progressive commentators as COVID cases spike in the Sun Belt and the South.
Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin hailed New York City the other day after it reported no deaths for the first time during the pandemic. This is what competent government can accomplish, she gushed.
Former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett tweeted, “Short term sacrifice saves lives!!!”
Neera Tanden, the head of the progressive think tank the Center for American
Progress, contrasted the response in Democratic states to that in Republican states: “It turns out we were lucky that this virus hit in blue states first. They had the thinking to take action to stop the spread of the virus in their states.”
This is all per- verse given that New York is only now emerging from one of the worst COVID debacles on the planet.
There is nonetheless a widespread feeling that New York has been blessed with its exemplary leadership. Gov. Cuomo, incredibly enough, has sky-high approval ratings.
If New York is going to be held up as the model, every officeholder in the country has a new road-map for handling the virus: See a significant percentage of residents of your largest city get infected, barely prevent your hospital system from getting overwhelmed, implement a policy that increases infections and deaths at nursing homes, suffer more than 30,000 deaths and a higher per-capita death rate than any country in the world — and then, after all that, get hailed as a hero.
If it worked for Cuomo, why not every other governor in the nation?
In fairness, New York had many factors working against it. It was hit first, while the virus and how to treat it were still poorly understood, and New
York City is an international travel hub with densely packed neighborhoods and a heavily trafficked public-transit system. Of course it got hammered.
The outbreaks in other parts of the country aren’t anything like what happened in New York, at least not yet. What states like Florida, Arizona, Texas and California are trying to do is avoid New York’s fate, even as they are lectured about the superiority of the Empire State’s approach.
The positivity rate — the percentage of tests coming back positive — has increased in all of these places, and in Arizona has gone above 20 percent. During the worst of the outbreak in New York, the seven-day moving average for the positivity rate reached an astronomical 50 percent.
Deaths are also going up in all these states, but the scale so far is completely different from what New York experienced. In New York, about 32,500 people have died. In Florida, a state of comparable population, about 4,300 people have died. In Texas and California, both bigger states, about 3,300 and 7,000 people have died.
In per-capita terms, New York has had 1,668 deaths per million. In contrast, Arizona has had 308, Florida 199, California 179 and Texas 114.
Just in terms of the sheer numbers, New York should be a watchword, not something to emulate.
It is in a better situation now, but only after the virus burned through much of the city. A state survey found that more than 20 percent of New York City residents have antibodies to the virus. At clinics in some hardhit neighborhoods about 60 percent of people have tested positive for antibodies. This isn’t an experience anyone should want to duplicate.
The fact is that the virus isn’t interested in scoring partisan points or establishing the superiority of Red State versus Blue State governance. It is highly infectious and now is hitting places it missed earlier in the pandemic as they have started to reopen.
We should wish them the very best — and fervently hope they don’t suffer the same calamity that befell New York.