After an alarming build-up of new COVID-19 instances in June and July, the country began to see a decrease in daily instances, bringing us back to the degrees of early July. These are encouraging symptoms given the painful two-month period, however, we are still adding tens of thousands of new daily instances nationwide and continue to waste many lives for the virus every day.
This is now a strange moment for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, so it’s best to write the leadership e-book in the event of a pandemic crisis.
What Cuomo has in his favor is that the daily number of instances in New York has been solid for several months. In fact, the state has passed several weeks since it recorded more than 20 deaths a day. This is the good news, and all Americans deserve to rejoice that the control of death in New York has loosened in spite of everything.
The bad news is that the state still records heaps of new cases every day, and the low number of daily deaths that occur lately has resulted in nearly 33,000 deaths previously. For the context, lately this is double the number of deaths recorded in New Jersey (nearly 16,000 at the time of writing this article), which is only New York in terms of deaths. Combined counts in California, Texas and Florida have just surpassed New York’s deaths. It should also be noted that the population of New York is smaller than that of the last 3 states.
It is especially frustrating then that Cuomo, in his speech to the Democratic National Convention, said: “COVID is the symptom, the disease … in many ways, COVID is just a metaphor.”
First, COVID-19 means “coronavirus disease, 2019”, so it is not a symptom or a disease, but a disease. Second, coronavirus literally, not metaphorically, has killed some 180,000 Americans, the highest proportion of whom were New Yorkers. The concept that COVID-19 can ever be described as “just a metaphor” is repugnant, especially coming from the kind that presided over such concentrated butchery.
Cuomo argues that his leadership is what has helped New York get out of a desperate situation. In fact, in those comments, he described New York as “point 0 for the COVID virus,” he said they went from “one of the highest infection rates in the world to one of the lowest.” It doesn’t matter that the first case shown and the first outbreaks in the United States occurred in Washington state and not in New York.
In addition, it is idea that the infection begins to disappear after approximately 20% of the population has become inflamed. It turns out that New York City has reached this point with approximately 19.5% of its inflamed population, as advised through antibody surveys.
During the same period, the Philadelphia area, which was also heavily affected by COVID-19, had about 3.8% of its infected population. It is less likely that Cuomo’s competent leadership ended the pandemic in New York and more likely, under his watch, the virus burned the population and ran out of New York to infect and kill. Although it might have been useless to prevent the spread of the virus, it did anything that had a massive effect: it sent the virus among the highest vulnerable to its worst consequences.
To be clear, policymakers deserve immense grace for making mistakes in the early reaction to the pandemic, but the resolve to force nursing homes to admit COVID-19 patients is absolutely unforgivable. At first we knew very little about coronavirus, but one of the few things we knew for sure was that the virus had a fatal effect on older people. However, Cuomo’s administration, which expired on 25 March, went ahead and forced nursing homes to admit or readmit patients despite a suspected or suspected case of COVID-19.
There are tactics for boys to describe the effect of this policy, but this name is quite concise: “Vacations in retirement homes in New York are triggering the COVID-19 crisis.” That’s why it’s so exasperating to hear the guilty of all of the above say, “We’ve shown that our trail has been successful.”
For this to be a success, the bar would have to be placed about 6 feet underground on a solitary plot. It is right to give leaders and decision makers credit for making difficult decisions in very dubious times, but it is also right to expect a modicum of humility and self-awareness.
Governor Cuomo, who presided over the worst reaction to the pandemic in the country and whose politics has actively and directly disturbed the situation, does not have to write an e-book to complement the well-made paintings. Precisely, it deserves no compliments for his intelligent leadership and we must not forget his “impossible mountain” of death.
Dr. Kevin Pham, M.D., is a visiting political analyst at the Heritage Foundation.