Bitter, Damning COVID News
Abombshell Empire Center report reveals that COVID hit New York far earlier and harder than was first reported — with the city suffering one of the deadliest peaks “of the entire global pandemic.” That makes ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s claims to great leadership during COVID even more laughable.
“By the yardstick that matters most — the number of lives lost — New York’s response was . . . among the least effective in the world,” notes report author Bill Hammond.
New modeling by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation shows New York’s first COVID wave had peaked by the time Cuomo (and his squabble-mate, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio) switched from “nothing to worry about” to “lock everything down.”
And other research shows the first nowknown COVID death in New York as coming in the last week of January 2020.
The institute’s work finds that wider COVID spread began early that February, and the infection rate likely peaked around March 19, three weeks earlier than previously believed, “an insight that might have significantly changed how officials handled the crisis,” sighs Hammond.
Doubly sickening, Cuomo’s deadly March 25 order requiring nursing homes to readmit infected patients was unnecessary because hospitals weren’t going to be overwhelmed.
To be fair, the blame here goes much further: Cuomo was operating off state data on COVID tests, which seemed to show a much later peak. But that was an artifact of testing becoming much more available because federal bureaucrats initially banned the use of any COVID tests but one they’d designed — which turned out not to work.
New York’s then-leaders still bear great blame because they didn’t probe to truly understand the data — and instead rushed to take drastic action, closing the barn door after the horse had already left.
And the metro area’s COVID death toll was perhaps the worst in the world: The city’s “cumulative mortality rate through December 2022 — at 496 deaths per 100,000 population — outstripped all 50 states” and all but four other countries.
Some of that was bad luck: We got hit early and proved extra-vulnerable thanks to high tourism and strong global commerce, heavy use of mass transit, etc. But, notes Hammond: “A well-functioning public health system should have foreseen such risks — and developed systems and backup plans to mitigate them — well before the threat emerged in Wuhan, China.”
After all, “Nearly every other city in the world — many of which faced the same disadvantages — managed the crisis better than New York.” Pray the state has better leadership in the next crisis.