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NEW YORK – A 39-year-old woman took Flight 701 from Doha, Qatar to John F. Kennedy International Airport in late February, the last leg of her return trip from Iran to NY. A week later, on March 1, he tested positive for the new coronavirus, the first confirmed case in the city of a disease that had already devastated China and parts of Europe. The next day, Governor Andrew Cuomo, along with the mayor. Bill de Blasio, he promised, at a press conference, that health researchers would locate all the people on the woman’s flight. But nothing was done.
A day later, a lawyer in New Rochelle, in the New York suburb, tested positive for the virus, an alarming sign since he had not traveled to any affected country, suggesting that the spread of the community was already taking place. Although investigators tracked the whereabouts and connections of the lawyer in Manhattan’s busiest corridors, the efforts were concentrated in the suburbs, not the city, and De Blasio asked the population not to worry.
“We will tell everyone in the second that we believe behavior should change,” said the mayor on March 5.
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For many days after the first positive case, when the coronavirus quietly spread throughout the New York area, Cuomo, De Blasio and their top advisers showed unshakable confidence that the outbreak would stop quickly. There will be cases, they repeatedly said, but New York’s hospitals were among the best in the world. The plans were being put into practice. The city had survived many things before: Ebola, Zika, H1N1, and even September 11.
“Sorry for our arrogance as New Yorkers, but we believe we have the best healthcare system on the planet here in New York,” Cuomo said on March 2. – What we are saying is that, what happened in other countries versus what happened here, we do not even imagine that it will be as bad as in other countries.
But now, New York City and neighboring suburbs have become the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, with more cases than in many countries. More than 138,000 people in the state tested positive for the virus, and on Wednesday, Cuomo announced that another 779 people died within 24 hours, the highest one-day total in the state to date. The death toll is almost 7,000 people.
Epidemiologists pointed to New York City’s density and its role as an international center of commerce and tourism to explain why the coronavirus has spread so rapidly. And it seems highly unlikely that any state or city response could have completely stopped the spread of the disease. Furthermore, since the early days of the crisis, state and municipal officials have been hampered by a chaotic and often dysfunctional federal response, which includes significant problems with the number of tests, making it much more difficult to assess the scope of the outbreak.
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Still, initial efforts by New York authorities to contain the pandemic were hampered by their own confusing patterns, unheard warnings, delayed decisions, and political disputes. According to Thomas R. Frieden, former chief of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and former commissioner of the city’s Department of Health, if the state and city had taken widespread social distance measures in a week or two Before, including the closing of schools, shops and restaurants, the estimated number of deaths from the outbreak could have been reduced from 50% to 80%.
– You have to act very quickly, in a matter of hours and days, not weeks. Once this spreads, there is no way to stop it.
Interviews with more than 60 people on the front lines of the crisis – city and state officials, hospital executives, health professionals, union leaders, and doctors working in emergencies – revealed how the virus caused authorities to improvise.
“Everything was slow,” said Brooklyn-based Councilman Stephen T. Levin, who had asked the city to take swift action as the outbreak spread. – It needs to adapt quickly, and nothing we were doing was adapt it quickly.
Cuomo and De Blasio have focused in recent days on widening the ability of the healthcare system to treat coronavirus patients as the outbreak nears its peak. The state and city created new wards, searched for respirators and protective gear worldwide, and aggressively recruited doctors and nurses across the country.
First case
Cuomo has been praised for his daily press conferences, where he not only focuses on facts about the pandemic, but also seeks to garner public support for his efforts to contain the spread. De Blasio also made press interviews a priority. Still, Cuomo sometimes acknowledges the difficulties in fighting the outbreak.
“I am tired of always being behind this virus,” he said on March 31. – We are trying to make up for lost time.
The governor and mayor emphasize that their efforts have pushed the Trump administration to act more decisively to contain the disease in the country. New York was the first state to obtain federal approval for its own coronavirus tests.
“All the actions I took at the time were criticized as premature,” Cuomo told the New York Times. – The facts showed that my decisions are correct.
In a statement, De Blasio added that it is “a virus that is only a few months old” and that it has to deal with “a science that changes every day.”
Hospitals also expressed confidence in their plans to respond to a pandemic. On March 2, the New York State Health Association stated that its members were “prepared for the increased influx of patients caused by Covid-19.” But few appear to have made significant efforts before the virus arrived to increase the supply of respirators or protective equipment. Instead, they used government emergency actions.
The New York authorities acted with the idea that the disease had not reached the state until the first case: the woman who returned from Iran. Now, however, they acknowledge that the virus was almost certainly in the state long before. Infectious disease experts had known for weeks, before any positive tests, that many of the first cases would be lost due to significant flaws in tests conducted by the federal government.
The initial plan was to track, isolate, and contain each case. Cuomo promised to do whatever it took to find all the connections with the woman who came from Iran, but no one did that job. Local officials were only able to request an investigation from the CDC, and the agency did not conduct any because it believed it had not been infected during the flight, according to authorities. Neither Cuomo nor De Blasio mentioned again any discovery about the passengers of that plane.
On March 5, De Blasio acknowledged that the virus had spread beyond his control. Still, not wanting to cause unnecessary alarm, he told New Yorkers to get on with their normal lives, leaving many confused about the danger they faced.
The city’s health secretary, Oxiris Barbot, tried to reassure the population in early February, saying the virus “could not be contracted in the subway or on the bus.” The mayor reiterated the statement several times in early March.
Old rivalry
But suddenly, the New York City system for detecting infectious diseases went on alert. Although only around 100 cases of coronavirus had been confirmed across the state, there was an increase in illnesses like the flu in emergencies in the first week of March. A few days later, the number of police officers called to care for the sick soared, as did the number of 911 calls with people with high fever and cough.
The governor and mayor began taking light measures to restrict people’s activities, but still met with resistance.
Behind the scenes, however, top health officials were already increasingly concerned. Demetre Daskalakis, the city’s chief disease control officer, threatened to withdraw if schools were not closed. And Barbot, who insisted at the start of the outbreak that “New Yorkers were still at low risk,” gave a much more terrifying assessment in a closed-door meeting with business executives at city hall on March 12: up to 70% of city residents could be infected.
De Blasio urged New Yorkers to start social distancing and work from home whenever possible. However, over the next weekend, much of the city’s nightlife seemed to continue at an accelerated rate.
Although advisers to the mayor and governor, both Democrats, worked together to respond to the pandemic, old rivalries began to emerge. Although the two leaders presented a unified front at the start of the outbreak, it was clear, in mid-March, that their long-standing political battles continued. The press conference on March 2 was their only appearance together.
School closings were the first disagreement. De Blasio, reluctant, was forced to comply with the decision after being pressured by the unions. Only after the decision about the schools did the mayor become firmer in suggesting major changes in everyday life.
“New Yorkers are likely to come home soon, except for the most necessary activities,” he said March 17, in an order similar to what had already been implemented in the California area.
This time, Cuomo resisted, calling for more gradual isolation.
“I am as scared of panic as I am of the virus, and I think the fear is more contagious than the virus right now,” said the governor, when asked two days later about the mayor’s comments.
But then things changed quickly in California, and Governor Gavin Newsom issued a state order for residents to stay home. The state had 675 confirmed cases. That same day, March 19, New York had 4,152.
That night, some 20 prominent New York leaders, including local members of Congress, neighborhood representatives, City Council members, and civic and religious figures, attended a conference call convened by State Attorney General Letitia James. Cuomo then gave up. The next day, he decided to close the trade. At the time, on March 20, the state had more than 7,000 confirmed cases.
The New York Police Department now begins the day every day with a review of how many of its 36,000 police officers are sick. In early April, it was approximately 19%.
That the massive and interconnected New York City was hit by the pandemic may have been inevitable. But Washington, and then New York State, had options. Its leaders had the power to make important decisions. His advisers argue that they moved as quickly as possible, given the flawed information they received from the federal government and in the midst of a rapid crisis, on a scale never seen before.
“This is an enemy that we underestimated from day one,” Cuomo admitted Monday. And we pay a high price for it.
