For months, the question was what America would learn from New York City’s brutal experience as the coronavirus rapidly overwhelmed our “disease detectives” and “tracing army” along with our hospitals and morgues before subsiding over the summer even as it started to spread across the rest of the country.
The question is what, if anything, New York has learned 24,188 deaths later as of Friday, with the virus having claimed more lives here this year than have been lost to murders this century, including on 9/11, and as positivity rates and hospitalization numbers are again shooting up ahead of what could be a dark winter.
The answer is not much, judging from how the city has closed its schools again even as bars and restaurants and gyms remain open and despite a trove of new studies showing that schools haven’t been hubs of transmission. That’s happened because of the competing metrics the governor and mayor insist on using and the competing thresholds they’ve established based on those competing metrics for making shutdown decisions, to be announced at competing press conferences.
Fundamentally, Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio — both of whom like to offer themselves as surrogate father figures while roping their own families into those performances — can’t get on the same page, leaving New Yorkers with no clear way to understand and plan for government decisions that immediately impact our work, school and home lives.
This is nothing new. The two have squabbled through public health crises going back to Ebola in 2014 and Legionnaires’ disease in 2015. This year, New Yorkers died after Cuomo delayed his “pause” of New York’s economy for a week as the virus raged because de Blasio had called for a “shelter in place” order. The mayor then shifted into cool uncle mode, bizarrely encouraging New Yorkers to get to the bar for one last round and taking himself to his gym in Park Slope for one last workout before the “pause” took effect.
Somehow, two men more concerned with message control than mission command keep making things worse through failure to communicate. There was Cuomo lashing out at a reporter Wednesday who said parents were confused about whether or not New York City’s school buildings were shutting down again and whether it was the mayor or governor who’d be making that call.
Cuomo, who’d already been told the mayor’s decision, called the question “obnoxious” and sneered: “No, they’re not confused. You’re confused…Read the law and you won’t be confused.”
Fact check: We’ve been confused. You all are confusing.
Speaking of obnoxious, Cuomo has been promoting his new book, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic,” claiming credit for New York’s record drop from its terrifying virus peak — which is a lot like Trump boasting about America’s “record” economic growth after its terrifying collapse — even while the numbers have started moving predictably back up as the temperature has dropped.
On Friday, Cuomo was named the winner of a special Emmy for “effective use of television during the pandemic,” since his “111 daily briefings worked so well because he effectively created television shows, with characters, plot lines, and stories of success and failure.” I bet he did great numbers in nursing homes.
At the same presser where he’d dodged the schools question by attacking the reporter (remind you of anyone?), Cuomo said that if things do get bad here again, it would be in spite of his micro-clusters and because of, well, the fatties and weaklings of New York:
“Just to make it very simple, if you socially distance and you wore a mask and you were smart, none of this would be a problem,” he said. “If you didn’t eat the cheesecake, you wouldn’t have a weight problem. It’s all self-imposed.”
Meantime, de Blasio flat-out says that he doesn’t have a plan for reopening schools now that he’s closed them, since he was too focused on getting them open in September to think much about this moment when it seemed so far off. Pathetic.
As is the mayor’s claim that he stuck with his 3% school closure threshold because that was a “social contract” with parents. Actually, that was a deal with the teachers union, whose president now says “If we want to keep our schools open, it’s up to everyone else.” De Blasio has had no issue breaking other promises to parents because of “different realities.” And as much as Cuomo relishes dunking on de Blasio, he’s not so eager to take on the UFT.
So here New Yorkers are, preparing for the worst while hampered and harried by the abject failure of our “leaders” to communicate with each other, or the rest of us. Some men, you just can’t reach.