Joseph Spector, David Robinson, Terrence T. McDonald and Meredith Newman, New York State team
First in a series. COVID-19 killed tens of thousands of people in the northeast, caused high unemployment and destroyed the economy. Today, USA TODAY Network Atlantic Group examines what the government was wrong about in its reaction to the virus, what policies nevertheless worked, and why we remain vulnerable if the coronavirus moves harder in the fall.
In the early days of March, Dr. Jeffrey Shaman watched from his home in New York as political leaders debated how productive the first cases of coronavirus were.
This led temporarily to screaming on television.
Shaman, an infectious disease expert at Columbia University, said he believed the city’s schools had been closed since the first week of March, or at least the week of the time.
“It was actually too slow,” he told USA TODAY Network Atlantic. “I live in New York and I couldn’t let the schools open.”
New York City schools were closed despite all of March 16 when the state recorded 950 COVID-19 cases and nine deaths.
New York and New Jersey had the number of coronavirus deaths in the country, with nearly 32,500 (including 4,600 likely deaths in New York City) and 15,700, respectively.
But infection rates in the Northeast have fallen to record levels in recent weeks, even when they have reached record levels in more than 30 other states, basically in the south and west.
Now the question is: how well are the northeastern states prepared for the peak of COVID-19?
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said it was “almost inevitable” for the state to assume what he called a momentary wave or at least an extension of the first wave.
“I feel like we’re on a beach, and we’re at sea, and we’re seeing the moment when the wave forms in the distance,” Cuomo said on July 17.
“So all New Yorkers must be on high alert.”
Nowhere in the country is there a region more aware of the influence of the virus than in the northeast. And this delight, with thousands of deaths, crowded hospitals and a declining economy, is helping to inform the culprits of the reaction to a planned wave of moments.
“We see the wave of the moment in the distance, ” continued Cuomo. “This will have an effect on New York. How bad? We don’t know. But we can’t prevent the virus at our borders. We check as much as we can.”
Shaman’s first warnings about the need for a quick shutdown were heeded. New York City closed non-essential personnel until March 22, when the state recorded 114 deaths and more than 15,000 cases.
Shaman co-wrote a study in May that new York could have stored up to 17,000 lives if he had instituted his order to stay home two weeks earlier.
“We didn’t detect and we didn’t temporarily report to see what was going on in China,” Shaman said. “We don’t follow in the footsteps of South Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan to control it, and we doubt and question the evidence and worry about the economic effect it would have, which I can understand.”
He added: “It’s a dubious and complicated time, but it’s one of the few cases where leadership matters.”
Cuomo blatantly blamed the federal government, saying he had allowed more than 3 million Europeans to reach the United States, most commonly in the northeast, at least six weeks before the pandemic became apparent.
A July 17 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention noted that, through Europe’s time constraints established on March 13, “the import and network transmission of SARS-CoV-2 had already taken a position in New York.”
A faster closure may also have stored more lives among the most vulnerable population, retirement homes and long-term care facilities.
Approximately 43% of deaths in New Jersey occurred in nursing homes, while nearly 6,300 deaths in New York, or 25% of the total, occurred in institutions.
Deaths in nursing homes have drawn scrutiny as to whether states deserve to have citizens most affected by COVID cases, but New York insisted that the challenge is because staff spread the infection through homes.
New York’s rep Tom Reed, Republican for Corning, is among those calling for an independent investigation into deaths in nursing homes.
He said on July 6 that blaming staff “when the state has knowingly created COVID hot spots by forcing homes to settle for positive COVID patients is a slap to those who have lost enjoyed it.”
The death toll in New York reached 800 in early April, however, now the deaths are in a figure and there have been some days without reported deaths.
The Northeast sees it this way, requiring about 40 14 days for visitors from high-rate states for full questionnaires when they enter New York.
And the slow reopening of the states has largely been a success compared to the southern and western states that are now final businesses for a wide reopening last month.
“The way to maintain our positivity rate and rate of transmission, or low transmission rate, is to take the precautions we’ve had over the past 4 months,” New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said on July 17.
The pandemic, in many ways, has exposed the flaws of American society.
Seeing coronavirus as a wildfire in low-income communities plagued by overcrowded housing underscored the systemic racism that drives disparate fitness outcomes for generations of blacks and Hispanics.
Stories of nurses and doctors inflamed with COVID-19 and dying as hospitals struggled to unload masks and protective gowns that open huge holes in the government’s emergency preparedness plans and garage systems.
And in the face of new outbreaks across the country, renewed fears of shortages of non-public protective devices and COVID-19 materials have also revealed the flaws in a chain of medical sources that relies too heavily on Chinese imports.
However, efforts in the Northeast for regional production of critical medical products and the COVID-19 control infrastructure appear promising as opposed to a wave at the moment.
New public aptitude responses to zip codes most affected by COVID-19 deaths also presented a ray of hope that key resources, such as touch finding, testing, and health care, would be more successful in communities of color.
Meanwhile, politically charged discussions about plans to reopen and wear the mask in public, which New York commissioned on April 15 to oppose the coronavirus epidemic, have put the entire company at risk across the country, experts said.
“We are witnessing tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths, ailments and riots because others do not need the evidence,” said Dr. Gregory Poland, an expert at the Society of Infectious Diseases of America and the Mayo Clinic.
“They make it a political, cultural, economic or devout issue, and that’s not the case,” he said. “The virus knows nothing about those areas. The virus only knows one thing: locate the next user in all likelihood and infect it.” In Delaware, public fitness officials saw a primary epidemic in April in small towns in Sussex County, mainly among Hispanics and Haitian immigrants. Communities. Many of those paintings of citizens in the county’s largest industry, bird processing plants, where to finish their paintings, staff will have to stay close to each other, without meeting social estrangement guidelines. Many of these low-income employees can’t lose a paycheck, making them reluctant to get tested, even if they’ve been exposed to the virus.
Language barriers were problematic when these citizens tried to access emergency resources and be informed about the security measures they are taking. This outbreak has led the state to test in Sussex County, adding to those poultry processing plants.
Delaware’s nursing homes were also devastated in the first few weeks of the pandemic. It has been difficult for institutions to unload protective appliances for employees. And many long-term care services have traditionally been unstaffed. Because of limited testing in Delaware at the time, citizens with symptoms can simply get a COVID-19 test.
Deaths in long-term care services contributed to more than 60% of the cumulative number of COVID-19 deaths in Delaware. This led Gov. John Carney to demand that all long-term care workers take the test weekly.
While Delaware experienced a decrease in the number of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, the Rehoboth-Dewey Beach zip code experienced an increase in cases last June. Many of these cases concerned youth and residents.
Last June, Carney announced that he was postponing Delaware’s plans to reopen its economy. Soon after, he demanded that, in eastern Sussex, buyers could no longer sit or stand in a bar. Instead, bathers will have to sit at a table and be taken care of.
The coronavirus pandemic hit Pennsylvania in March, and Gov. Tom Wolf sought his biggest concern: hospitals hit that had no beds for patients.
Pennsylvania has never run out of hospital beds or major admirers, even when the virus peaked in April.
But corporations have opened up in defiance of state orders. Republican lawmakers have tried to wipe out the emergency powers of Wolf, a Democrat. Deaths in nursing homes were in the thousands, representing approximately 70% of COVID-19 deaths.
Millions of jobs have been lost. Companies have struggled to survive. Without a ransom, the eating places industry can be just a shadow of itself, especially now that the governor has ordered them to reduce their resilience to 25% or close again.
Prisons have reduced their population through early departures. But inmate advocates and prison secretary John Wetzel agree that the population of state prisons wants to shrink further, especially in places that are old and poorly designed for infection control.
And now, as administrators, parents, and politicians discuss whether to send young people back to school, Pennsylvania is experiencing a wave of new cases.
This pandemic has led Pennsylvania into recession. Unemployment assistance during a pandemic and the paycheck coverage program have helped, but they have an expiration date and, for now, “this virus is the case,” said Labor and Industry Secretary Jerry Oleksiak.
So even as the state emerges from economic stagnation, peak unemployment and the ongoing public aptitude crisis are slowing down the process, making economists agree on one thing: Pennsylvania won’t emerge from this crisis for years.
Many fitness experts have attributed the most egregious missteps to the federal government’s lack of leadership.
Critical levels from the distribution of faulty CDC kits to states, which delayed the pandemic reaction in January and February, to the Trump administration’s combined messages about the risk posed by the spikes in COVID-19 cases.
“We don’t have a transparent national policy on this, and that’s pretty obvious,” said Dr. Michael Mendoza, fitness commissioner for Monroe County in New York.
In the absence of a universal plan, some states have ignored or avoided classes learned in the Northeast, threatening to undo the network sacrifices that have helped infections in New York and New Jersey.
“When our messages and knowledge have been politicized and distorted … is when it has become very complicated for us,” Mendoza said.
Amid the chaotic first weeks of this spring’s pandemic, the political-driven confusion proved to be damaging due to limited clinical understanding at the time of the spread of the stealth virus before symptoms gave the impression on many people.
As the extensive care sets were filled, state officials worked to increase the capacity of hospital beds. Concerns that hospitals are running out of major breathing apparatus have sparked an interstate festival among fans, rather than a coordinated national response.
Ultimately, the imperfect preparedness plan and the scattered emergency reaction helped sustain the revelations that are taking position today, such as the possibility that all Americans dressed in masks in public could spread the virus in 4 to six weeks.
In analysing the myriad similar to the Pandemic, Poland of the Mayo Clinic referred to the conclusions of the Commission’s report on 11 September, which was excavating the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001.
“We believe that the basic challenge was a credibility challenge, although we were warned several times and in many ways, we didn’t think it was imaginable and therefore we didn’t prepare,” he said, recounting the report.
“I think this singular is exactly applicable to the pandemic,” Poland said, adding, “I hope that something that has happened is that our denial has been eliminated and our enthusiastic ability to imagine.”
Northeastern states continue to restrict reopening
New York and New Jersey have reopened many businesses and kept some closed.
No state has the legal resumption of indoor food. Shopping malls, casinos and amusement parks remained closed in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania opened them with safety precautions.
And New York has tightened restrictions on outdoor dining, requiring alcohol purchases to be accompanied through food to the main drinking places.
It is a procedure that northeasterly governors continue to compare based on monitoring infection rates. The challenge is that the immediate spread of the disease in most of the country will eventually cause an uptick in the states they have controlled to mitigate the virus.
“This wave at the moment will be just states that will infect us again for the time being,” Cuomo said on July 16 on MSNBC.
Stage control has been long since early March.
When the first case of coronavirus hit New Jersey, the general manager of the state was on duty.
Gov. Phil Murphy underwent surgery to remove a tumor in his kidney on March 4, and ceded his authority to Deputy Governor Sheila Oliver. That night, fitness officials announced that a 32-year-old man from Fort Lee had the first diagnosis of coronavirus in the state.
The days, weeks and months that followed were chaotic, with Murphy and other officials passing on confusing sets of regulations designed to involve the epidemic as the virus spread throughout the state.
Murphy has earned voter praise, and polls show widespread approval for his handling of the coronavirus crisis.
“There’s no vaccine yet,” Murphy warned on July 17.
“All we have is social estrangement, dressing up in a mask every time you’re in public and, in fact, every time you’re inside, you wash your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds.
New Jersey Republican lawmakers allege that Murphy excluded state lawmakers when he drafted orders related to coronavirus, unfairly allowing large stores to remain open while forcing small retail stores to close. He limited the outdoor rallies and then showed up at black Lives Matters rallies where the protesters were not socially estranged. However, these meetings have not been shown to generate spikes in COVID-19 cases.
Like other states that were heavily affected at the start of the epidemic, New Jersey did not have enough verification kits, supplies, lab functions, or workers’ bodies to control others early.
But like other northeastern states, Murphy’s strategy began to look smarter in July.
States such as California, Texas and Florida, which reopened before New Jersey, began to see the accumulation of virus cases and their governors reopened businesses that had allowed reopening.
Now, Murphy hopes not to enroll in those states, so he has to replace the course.
“We are all proud of the fact that we need this to be as fair as possible,” he said.
Gannett (c) USA TODAY NETWORK