YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
MAYOR MARKS HAUNTING ANN’Y SINCE FIRST COVID CASE IN CITY
A year after the city saw its first known case of coronavirus, the start of the worst public health disaster in a century, Mayor de Blasio on Monday repeated calls for greater vaccine supplies and briefly looked back on the crisis to date.
“We have everything we need except the supply,” he said at a press conference, noting nearly 2 million New Yorkers have been vaccinated since mid-December. “Our goal [of] 5 million New Yorkers fully vaccinated by June — that goal is in reach.
“We still need more help from the state government,” Hizzoner added. “We still need more help from the manufacturers to make sure the supply is consistent, to make sure it grows.”
The comments came after a rocky nationwide rollout of vaccines in which the city briefly shut down vaccination sites due to low supplies near the start of February. A major snowstorm also caused appointment cancellations last month.
With the Biden administration working to boost distribution, the city vaccinated 338,000 people last week, a number de Blasio wants to increase to 500,000 per week.
There was little mention Monday of the one-year anniversary of the first confirmed COVID case in the city — a Manhattan woman in her 30s who had recently traveled to Iran, viewed as a hotspot at the time.
Officials and everyday New Yorkers alike had no idea what was in store — emergency declarations, shutdowns of most parts of ordinary life and a city death toll that would reach 29,408 as of Monday morning, according to the Health Department.
As late as March 13, 2020, de Blasio and other elected officials were reluctant to shut down the city, with Hizzoner telling New Yorkers that day: “We want people still to go on about their lives. We want people to rest assured that a lot is being done to protect them.”
But as the number of COVID cases skyrocketed, overwhelming hospitals and terrifying New Yorkers, de Blasio shut down schools on March 16, his tone noticeably darkening from around that point on.
He beat Gov. Cuomo to the punch on calling for a shelter-in-place order, leading to one of numerous standoffs between the mayor and governor.
Cuomo finally agreed on March 22, though the delay may have cost thousands of lives — researchers at Columbia University found 17,500 fewer people would have died in the metropolitan area had lockdown measures gone into effect just a week earlier.
Asked what should have been done differently during the course of the outbreak, de Blasio pointed to the delay on issuing the shelter-in-place order, though he shied
away from naming Cuomo.
“I called for it, obviously; the state resisted. That was a huge mistake,” the mayor said. “We should have done it immediately. Thank God it happened, but it should have been done immediately.”
He lamented the lack of testing early in the outbreak, recalling spring pleas from him and other officials for the federal government to take more action as then-President Donald Trump played down the scope of the pandemic. De Blasio also hailed the end-of-year release of COVID vaccines as a “miracle,” but added that the White House had a “lost opportunity” to invoke a statute requiring manufacturers to boost production.
Cuomo, who spent the latter part of 2020 boasting of his handling of the outbreak — including publishing a self-congratulatory book on “leadership lessons” from the crisis — had no public events scheduled for Monday. He’s avoided the spotlight since two women former staffers detailed sexual harassment allegations against him over the past week.
“This has been an incredibly long 365 days and there are more ahead, but New Yorkers have already shown unprecedented perseverance and toughness throughout this pandemic — now we just need to get to the light at the end of the tunnel,” Cuomo said in a statement that noted a steady decrease in positive COVID infection rates since a postholiday peak.
De Blasio sounded an optimistic note as he looked ahead to the rest of 2021 — “after this incredibly difficult year, this city has an amazing ability to come back strong,” he said — though the feud with the governor’s office remains in full effect.
In addition to lambasting Cuomo over the sexual harassment allegations, de Blasio criticized the governor for overseeing state-run vaccination sites in the city that serve many people living outside the Big Apple.
Out of doses the state-run site at the Javits Center in Midtown has administered, more than 42% went to non-NYC residents, according to de Blasio’s office. At the state-run site at the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, 75% of shots have gone to non-NYC residents.
“Unless they are targeted properly, these big sites do not actually help us improve equity and fight disparity,” the mayor said.
Following a pattern of tit-fortat exchanges the past 12 months, Cuomo’s office noted shots at Javits and the racetrack have gone to essential workers who live outside the city but work in the Big Apple, although the office did not provide a breakdown of the numbers.
“Once again, the mayor’s argument doesn’t make sense,” Cuomo spokesman Jack Sterne said in a statement. “Our focus is on getting shots into arms as fast as possible, and we won’t let the mayor’s petty politics distract from that goal.”