by Andrew Cuomo
The opinions and statements contained in this book are those of the author only and do not represent those of any state government agency.
Copyright © 2020 by Andrew M. Cuomo
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Hardback ISBN 9780593239261
Ebook ISBN 9780593239278
crownpublishing.com
Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Christopher Brand
ep_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
March 1 | 1 New Case | 0 Hospitalized | 0 Deaths
March 2 | 0 New Cases | 0 Hospitalized | 0 Deaths
March 3 | 1 New Case | 1 Hospitalized | 0 Deaths
March 6 | 22 New Cases | 5 Hospitalized | 0 Deaths
March 7 | 11 New Cases | 10 Hospitalized | 0 Deaths
March 9 | 28 New Cases | 8 Hospitalized | 0 Deaths
March 10 | 63 New Cases | 14 Hospitalized | 0 Deaths
March 11 | 44 New Cases | 32 Hospitalized | 0 Deaths
March 12 | 56 New Cases | 47 Hospitalized | 0 Deaths
March 13 | 102 New Cases | 50 Hospitalized | 0 Deaths
March 14 | 164 New Cases | 117 Hospitalized | 2 Deaths
March 15 | 131 New Cases | 137 Hospitalized | 1 Death
March 16 | 294 New Cases | 158 Hospitalized | 6 Deaths
March 17 | 432 New Cases | 326 Hospitalized | 5 Deaths
March 18 | 1,009 New Cases | 496 Hospitalized | 4 Deaths
March 19 | 1,769 New Cases | 617 Hospitalized | 22 Deaths
March 20 | 2,950 New Cases | 1,042 Hospitalized | 8 Deaths
March 21 | 3,254 New Cases | 1,406 Hospitalized | 12 Deaths
March 22 | 4,812 New Cases | 2,043 Hospitalized | 38 Deaths
March 25 | 5,145 New Cases | 4,079 Hospitalized | 75 Deaths
March 27 | 7,379 New Cases | 6,481 Hospitalized | 134 Deaths
March 28 | 7,681 New Cases | 7,328 Hospitalized | 209 Deaths
March 29 | 7,195 New Cases | 8,503 Hospitalized | 237 Deaths
March 30 | 6,984 New Cases | 9,517 Hospitalized | 253 Deaths
March 31 | 9,298 New Cases | 10,929 Hospitalized | 332 Deaths
April 4 | 10,841 New Cases | 15,905 Hospitalized | 630 Deaths
April 5 | 8,327 New Cases | 16,837 Hospitalized | 594 Deaths
April 7 | 8,174 New Cases | 17,493 Hospitalized | 731 Deaths
April 8 | 10,453 New Cases | 18,079 Hospitalized | 779 Deaths
April 13 | 6,337 New Cases | 18,825 Hospitalized | 671 Deaths
April 14 | 7,177 New Cases | 18,697 Hospitalized | 778 Deaths
April 15 | 11,571 New Cases | 18,335 Hospitalized | 752 Deaths
April 20 | 4,726 New Cases | 16,103 Hospitalized | 478 Deaths
April 21 | 4,178 New Cases | 16,044 Hospitalized | 481 Deaths
April 22 | 5,526 New Cases | 15,599 Hospitalized | 474 Deaths
April 24 | 8,130 New Cases | 14,258 Hospitalized | 422 Deaths
April 27 | 3,951 New Cases | 12,819 Hospitalized | 337 Deaths
April 30 | 4,681 New Cases | 11,598 Hospitalized | 306 Deaths
May 1 | 3,942 New Cases | 10,993 Hospitalized | 289 Deaths
May 10 | 2,273 New Cases | 7,262 Hospitalized | 207 Deaths
May 11 | 1,660 New Cases | 7,226 Hospitalized | 161 Deaths
May 17 | 1,889 New Cases | 5,897 Hospitalized | 139 Deaths
May 29 | 1,551 New Cases | 3,781 Hospitalized | 67 Deaths
June 1 | 941 New Cases | 3,331 Hospitalized | 54 Deaths
June 2 | 1,329 New Cases | 3,121 Hospitalized | 58 Deaths
June 12 | 822 New Cases | 1,898 Hospitalized | 42 Deaths
June 15 | 620 New Cases | 1,608 Hospitalized | 25 Deaths
June 18 | 618 New Cases | 1,358 Hospitalized | 29 Deaths
June 19 | 716 New Cases | 1,220 Hospitalized | 25 Deaths
The Aftermath
A Blueprint for Going Forward
Photo Insert
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Andrew Cuomo
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
I NORMALLY DON’T TURN OFF MY cellphone when I sleep, because the work of being governor is literally twenty-four hours a day, and the phone pings all night long. If I’m really tired, I will turn it off, but that doesn’t mean people can’t get me; it’s just harder. My office phone is always answered, at night by a New York State trooper. Callers must convince the trooper that their issue is really important. Some troopers are easier to convince than others. Some troopers decide that it’s safer to put all callers through, but as I joke to my team, those troopers learn quickly that it is not in fact safer when they are then assigned to different duties.
When my cellphone rang late on March 1, I hadn’t turned it off, but I didn’t get to it in time. Moments later, the landline rang. It was Melissa DeRosa, secretary to the governor and my top aide. Brilliant, tough, indefatigable, and widely respected, she is the quarterback on my team and is responsible for managing all the pieces.
“Governor, I’m sorry to stalk you with the multiple calls, but we just received a confirmation from Wadsworth.” This was the New York State Department of Health’s lab in Albany. “New York has its first case of coronavirus—a health-care worker who just returned to New York City from Iran. We believe the incident is isolated. I have Dr. Zucker on the other line. Can I conference him in?”
“Please put him through,” I said.
As the state health commissioner, Dr. Howard Zucker, began to run through the patient’s background, symptoms, and literal steps taken between landing at JFK airport and reaching her apartment in Manhattan, it seemed as though white noise washed over the line. I couldn’t prove it, but I knew this wasn’t New York’s first coronavirus case. And I knew the country wasn’t prepared.
The good news that night was that this was a fairly straightforward case, which would hopefully not cause great public alarm: The thirty-nine-year-old woman had traveled to Iran to provide health services and returned to New York feeling ill, but she knew to take precautions and did not come in contact with many people. She had been traveling with her male partner and had worn a mask. She took an Uber from the airport to her apartment and then called ahead to the hospital to make arrangements to be tested. In many ways it was the best-case scenario: an informed health-care worker who did the right thing.
However, even this single case in the state of New York presented complications and foreshadowed what was to come. What flight did she take? Could she have infected people on the plane? Who was responsible for contacting all the passengers on the flight? How about the Uber driver? Were the proper precautions taken at the hospital? These were the operational issues that we would need to figure out and standardize quickly, and they were mind-boggling when we considered the volume of cases we could anticipate given what we already knew about the virus.
A few weeks earlier, we had received the first taste of what was to come. On Febr
uary 6, I was sitting at my desk in my New York City office at 633 Third Avenue in Manhattan working on a speech. My director of administration, Stephanie Benton, came in because I had an important call. Stephanie organizes the executive chamber operations and has been with me since I started as attorney general, fourteen years ago. She can juggle ten balls at a time and always does it with a smile. I am fully aware that my ability to function and get things done is dependent on Stephanie and the strong team around her.
On the phone line was Rick Cotton, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a powerful agency that operates bridges, tunnels, and airports, as well as the Port of New York. Rick called to tell me that federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) officials had contacted him about passengers on a cruise ship nearby who they believed were positive for COVID-19. HHS wanted to dock the ship at a Port Authority facility and New York to take charge of the patients.
The novel coronavirus—formally the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which is the virus that causes the disease we’ve come to know as COVID-19—was at that time thought to be largely contained in China, with a few scattered cases in Washington and California. But this was the first case that would come knocking on New York’s door.
When the call came in, the Ebola crisis from years earlier flashed in my mind—how we handled it, what went right, and what went wrong. In 2014, a health-care worker who had been helping out with an Ebola outbreak in Africa returned to New York after having contracted the disease. He rode the subway, ate in a restaurant, and visited a bowling alley before he knew he was sick. People got scared. Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey and I held a joint press conference, because we shared control of the Port Authority, to announce a policy to screen people at the airports and, if necessary, quarantine them. When another health-care worker arrived at Newark airport, also returning from Africa, airport officials ordered the woman held in quarantine in a tent at the airport, where she was given nothing more than granola bars and a cellphone, which she quickly used to call CNN. We hadn’t forgotten the pitfalls of forced quarantine.
As would happen again and again over the course of this emergency, dozens of questions flooded my thoughts: What if the patients said they wanted to leave? What was the Department of Health’s authority to hold patients? If patients agreed to come with us, where should we bring them? Do they need a hospital? Do the hospital and medical staff need to take special precautions? If we are quarantining them in a hotel, do we have the legal authority to force them to stay? Can they leave the hotel room at all? How do they get meals? Can housekeeping staff enter the room? What medical assistance do they need? How long will they be sick?
The questions were obvious, and the answers were few. HHS was alarmingly ignorant. In the end, the ship docked in Bayonne, New Jersey, and the four passengers who were transferred to a hospital for further evaluation tested negative, but the situation gave me the first true sense that we were on a journey to a place we had never been before. I sat back and wondered, how did the great United States of America get to this point?
When COVID first hit, it was inconceivable to me that the federal government would abandon its basic role of managing a federal emergency, but that is exactly what would happen as soon as they understood the depth of the problem, the complexity of the solution, and the political pain that needed to be endured in the coming weeks and months. Before the extent of the crisis was revealed, the federal government initially sought control. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were very possessive of the initial testing strategy, deciding who should be tested, when they would be tested, when states would receive the results, and who was being screened at airports and how. Making the bureaucratic nightmare worse, every single test was routed to a single lab in Atlanta—a lab that, by the middle of February, had already been known to return faulty results. It was clear that building out testing operations would be key to controlling the spread not just in New York but in the whole country. You didn’t have to have spent a lifetime in government to know the system in place was set up for failure.
Given the consistent irrationality of the Trump administration, why would anyone think this federal government would act responsibly or competently? I had deep philosophical differences with Trump before COVID began. I believed he was a salesman who adopted hyper-conservative positions to win as a Republican. I knew Trump from earlier days in New York and was aware of his lifestyle. He was anything but hyper-conservative. Trump had no government experience when he took office, and he was rarely involved in substantive policy once he did. Most qualified professionals in the Trump administration came and left before their dinner got cold. Trump, from all evidence, believed the pandemic was just another public relations matter.
In February, before the first COVID case came to New York, I had already been tied up in my latest fight with the president, a very public, very ugly battle with the administration over the Trusted Traveler Program. Otherwise known as Global Entry, the program allowed high-volume travelers the convenience of skipping long lines at customs. As part of his election-year strategy focusing on deportation and immigration, Trump had his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ban New York State residents from participating in the program. It was a blatant act of retaliation for a state law I had signed the previous year allowing undocumented immigrants to receive driver’s licenses while shielding applicants’ information from immigration enforcement agencies. While public health shouldn’t be a political issue, with the Trump administration everything was political.
In retrospect, how ironic was it that the White House, which was initially so controlling, would soon run from the entire situation? In any event, I was already frustrated with their inability to make simple timely decisions about testing procedures and protocols. It was around this time that President Trump announced that Vice President Pence would head the White House Coronavirus Task Force. The Pence appointment was criticized not only because Trump made it but also because Vice President Pence, the former governor of Indiana, had been very slow to address or acknowledge the HIV crisis. Another criticism was that his appointment would politicize the task force when it would be better left to health professionals and substantive cabinet secretaries. On this I disagreed. I was a former cabinet secretary and have great respect for the position. They are weighty offices, no doubt. Confirmed by the U.S. Senate, they carry lifetime titles and are in the line of succession for the presidency. As Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary, I was thirteenth in the line of succession. If there were twelve simultaneous heart attacks, I would’ve been president of the United States. However, the COVID effort was going to be administration-wide and the vice president was in a much better position to command control over the entirety of the federal government. I publicly supported the president’s appointment of Pence. I thought it was a positive sign that the president was putting his senior official in charge. I was wrong. I would be wrong many times throughout the crisis.
We were in a new moment in politics and government. There was no delay in communication. Everything was instantaneous. There were no letters or emissaries sent. I would do several media events per day. My words would immediately reach the White House, which would often immediately respond. Social media changed intergovernmental dialogue. I was direct to camera supporting Pence, and the White House would see it immediately. The White House was obviously appreciative of my position on Pence.
The last week of February, the vice president and I spoke, and we discussed the testing logjam. As a former governor, he understood the situation. He was also clearly navigating his federal authority for the first time. The vice president has no specific portfolio and no direct authority over an agency head. Of course, he has a great title, but stubborn agency heads could always pose a problem because they have ultimate constitutional legal authority. We needed Pence to in
tervene with the FDA to expedite the approval for New York to run our own COVID test. To my pleasant surprise he did, and the FDA approved New York’s testing in its own laboratory.
As it turned out, that moment would change history. With the FDA approval, we could finally test for COVID in New York State, instead of shipping specimens to Atlanta one at a time. New York State had cut out the middleman, just in time for the call I was about to receive that Sunday night confirming what in my gut I already knew: Coronavirus had reached New York.
* * *
—
SO MUCH WAS unknown. In some ways I was not prepared for the moment, because no one could truly be prepared for the moment. In other ways, I have spent my whole life preparing for it.
I have a healthy cynicism about people in general and an unhealthy cynicism about politics and government in particular. But understanding people’s experiences, motivations, and biases is always the starting point for me in judging what they have to say. So let me explain mine.
I’m sixty-two years old, and life has taken me up and down and all around. I grew up in New York City as an outer-borough, middle-class guy. I paid my way through school with every odd job imaginable: landscaper, night-shift security guard, mechanic, ice cream scooper, tow truck driver, and construction worker. I have been a campaign manager, started a nonprofit to help the homeless, served as an assistant DA, practiced law privately, worked in real estate finance, was a federal cabinet secretary, state attorney general, and now governor. I’ve loved and lost. I’ve lived through an embarrassing and very public divorce splashed across the front pages of the tabloids. I suffered the pain of feeling I failed my children. I was publicly humiliated by losing campaigns and was declared a political dead man. I suffered through my father’s crushing political downfall and shared his grief and recriminations afterward.
