Mandates & moving people to do the right thing
One in a hundred New Yorkers and nearly one in fifty Manhattanites tested positive for coronavirus in the last week as I write this Friday morning. But while we sure as hell haven’t been “flattening the curve,” that hasn’t translated yet, knock on wood, into an overwhelmed hospital system, let alone bodies piling up faster than they can be buried like they did last year.
Most New Yorkers are vaccinated now and many are boosted, which isn’t slowing transmission but appears to be protecting people from the worst of it, along with advances in treatments and in our understanding of the pandemic.
When New Yorkers were dying in staggering numbers, that was a catastrophe. Mostly vaccinated people testing positive in staggering numbers is a problem.
Given how the feds dropped the ball on developing and distributing tests, it’s not a problem that our local leaders — including the outgoing mayor who actually closed testing sites weeks before omicron hit — are in a position to fix.
It turns out that press conferences blasting Trump and preaching about “trust the science” aren’t worth so much now that the Cuomosexual coffee mugs are 80% off and the positivity numbers are exponentially up.
A few people in positions of some power here are talking about doing big things now.
Public Advocate and, more to the point here, gubernatorial candidate Jumaane Williams says we should shut down the schools and go remote again. Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew says, correctly, that there’s “overwhelming evidence that the testing system for our school system has fallen apart.” (In fact, it was never more than taped together in the hope that things would just sort of work out on their own.) He’s also ready to go remote again if things don’t improve quickly next year on Eric Adams’ watch.
And Bill de Blasio reverted to self-serving and sanctimonious form when he took to MSNBC earlier this month to announce a private sector mandate that’s supposed to take effect days before he leaves office, that doesn’t have his successor’s sign-on, and that looks less like an actual policy than an ad for his own nascent gubernatorial campaign.
The lame duck is looking for a new job after a contest to replace him that was held in the midst of the pandemic, limiting in-person campaigning — with the notable exception of Andrew Yang who offered bottled sunshine and showed up everywhere until he predictably caught the virus — for months while forcing debates on Zoom without a single question asked or a single candidate volunteering a serious answer about what they’d do if things got bad again.
With the numbers bad again, Adams, looking ahead to schools reopening on Jan. 3, two days after he becomes mayor, says that “we can’t close down the city any time a new variant comes up.”
“Our goal is to not let anything shut down,” Gov. Hochul, who’s lapping Williams, de Blasio and the rest of the Democrats hoping to replace her in the early polls, says, quite reasonably. “Isolation is terrible. It’s just so excruciating what people had to go through last year.”
She’s resisted mandates of the sort de Blasio has used, effectively, to push first teachers, and then the rest of the city workforce, including police officers, to get vaccinated. Hochul, despite de Blasio’s entreaties, has not followed suit with MTA workers or other state employees.
A recent New York Times story, “Government vaccine requirements affect 12 million workers,” helps explain why. The news buried under that cartoonishly boring headline was that the paper’s analysis of local mandates, almost all of them imposed in states and cities that backed Biden, “did not seem to see any significant increase in the rate of vaccinations after the mandates, possibly because many of those areas already had relatively high vaccination rates.”
All told, just eight of the 31 places the Times analyzed had a vaccination rate that outpaced the national one by more than one percentage point after their mandate announcement, with New York City and State both among those eight.
But only one of the 31 places, Mississippi, increased its vaccination rate by more than two percent after imposing the mandate, compared to the same period there just before imposing it.
It turns out the places with the political will to impose vaccines were the ones where mandates weren’t much needed, or particularly effective.
My wife and I are vaxxed and boosted and our kids are vaxxed, and I think pretty much everyone should be, if not for their own sakes then for the vulnerable among us and to avoid needlessly clogging the medical system.
But I don’t see how New York could possibly mandate or shut down its way out of this, and the impact of closing schools in particular is immense for kids and parents — even as a vocal minority of the “trust the science” crowd managed to ignore that impact over the last year and a half.