American Crisis

by Andrew Cuomo

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  SOME ON THE RIGHT were blaming China for allowing the virus to spread. Trump wasn’t helping by constantly referring to it as “the China virus.” On March 10, an Asian woman in Manhattan was attacked with a punch in the face for not wearing a mask. Masks weren’t yet required for everyone, so this was clearly someone targeted for her ethnicity. It was another caution to me about the delicacy of society’s emotional response and how quickly fear turns into anger. The communication strategy was everything.

  MARCH 12 | 56 NEW CASES | 47 HOSPITALIZED | 0 DEATHS

  “Reduce the spread of the disease to make sure that you can treat the number of people who get infected.”

  EVERYTHING WAS RAMPING UP AT light speed: the public anxiety, the avalanche of press inquiries, the challenge of coordinating hundreds of local governments and school districts. Each hour brought dozens of new issues to light, none of which were readily answered.

  The increase in the number of cases in less than two weeks since the first case was alarming. We were watching the health system in Italy melt down and starting to talk to hospitals about developing surge capacity, increasing ventilator supply, setting up temporary hospitals, and possibly canceling elective surgeries, which would free up a lot of beds. We were also very aware of the deaths in the nursing home in Washington State; early in the outbreak—before a single person had died of COVID in New York—we required our nursing home staff to wear masks, be monitored for symptoms, cohort residents with COVID separate and apart from noninfected residents, and allow no visitors except in possible exigent circumstances.

  We announced that gatherings with more than five hundred attendees must be canceled or postponed. As part of that, we shut down Broadway theaters. Initially, the theaters wanted to operate at half capacity, but they soon capitulated to our full closure, in part because that way they’d be entitled to insurance money, which would save them from bankruptcy.

  When we announced that the St. Patrick’s Day Parade would be postponed, a reporter from the New York Post complained, “There are a lot of people who love the parade.” She was right: New York loves parades. Almost every group has its own parade. We have the Celebrate Israel Parade, the Greek Parade, the Columbus Day Parade, the West Indian Day Parade, the National Puerto Rican Day Parade, the African American Day Parade, the Pride March. The parades are a symbol of our diversity and a sign of respect for every member of our New York family. The St. Patrick’s Day Parade is one of the oldest and largest parades. Not only is it a tribute to the Irish community, but it is also a favorite of the Catholic Church. I am Catholic but have had my issues with the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. I support a woman’s right to choose and marriage equality. The Catholic Church is vehemently opposed to both. New York was the first big state to pass marriage equality legislation that allowed same-sex couples to marry, and the Church never forgave me. It didn’t really matter that the Supreme Court of the United States went on to find prohibition against same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional; the Church still didn’t let me forget. I remember attending a service with my daughters at a church in Mount Kisco the Sunday after passing that law. The priest gave a homily about how reprehensible marriage equality was. We got up and left in the middle of the service. This was after we’d had to leave our previous church because the congregation gave the priest a hard time for letting me attend services there because I was divorced. I also had refused to get an annulment that would have made my children illegitimate. I had also advocated for and signed the Child Victims Act into law, allowing people who were sexually assaulted by a member of the clergy to sue for damages. This law had significant financial ramifications for the Catholic Church.

  My father also supported a woman’s right to choose, and at the time the Catholic Church threatened my father with excommunication. My father was raised on the old Baltimore Catechism; by those rules, if you were excommunicated, you could not get into heaven. Purgatory was the best you could hope for. But then the Church eliminated purgatory as a concept, and now you had a real conundrum. It hurt my father deeply, and he gave a famous speech at the University of Notre Dame explaining how he reconciled his Catholic faith with his public duty as governor. But these were old and deep wounds.

  The tension with the Church was personally painful to me as well. As a former altar boy raised in Catholic schools, I will say that their displeasure still resonates to this day. Postponing the St. Patrick’s Day Parade was going to make a bad situation worse, I feared.

  In retrospect, shutting down the parade was an obvious move to make, but at the time, when all of this was still new and unfolding, the critics were loud and had a lot of support. St. Patrick’s Day is a high holy day in New York. However, the history and facts were undeniable. In the 1918 flu pandemic, Philadelphia allowed a parade in support of Liberty Bonds for World War I, which increased the spread of the virus exponentially. Even during these early days of the coronavirus, we had seen that allowing large celebrations to go on in other states resulted in long-term damage and even death. New Orleans had allowed Mardi Gras celebrations to go forward in late February, an “epidemiologist’s nightmare,” as The New York Times put it.

  At this point the federal government hadn’t even put forth national guidelines to establish which activities were safe and which should be prohibited, leaving decisions to state and local governments. This has its downsides. Local politicians are focused on their smaller, regional constituencies, which means making decisions that offend the local community is not easy. National guidance can be helpful. Also, when I get to the pearly gates, I don’t believe postponing the St. Patrick’s Day Parade will be at the top of the list of reasons why I am denied admission. At the end of the day, the hard decision was the right decision, and the history books will make the ultimate determination.

  The St. Patrick’s Day Parade highlighted an ongoing major tension in taking action. I wanted to be aggressive in combating the virus, but we could not get ahead of the degree of public acceptance and compliance. If the public refused to follow an executive order, it would all be over. They would then disregard all the difficult executive orders, and we would be powerless to enforce compliance. I needed to bring the public along with me. If we canceled the St. Patrick’s Day Parade but people showed up anyway, it would signal a major problem. Fortunately, the officials involved in the parade were all too willing to support my decision as long as I went first and took the heat.

  MARCH 13 | 102 NEW CASES | 50 HOSPITALIZED | 0 DEATHS

  “At times of crisis you tend to see what people are really made of.”

  WE DID THE MORNING BRIEFING from New Rochelle, which now had the highest cluster of cases in the country. We had already closed the schools there and banned large gatherings, and the National Guard had come in to help clean and distribute meals to people in quarantine.

  I felt it was important to let people know that basic security was in place and life’s essentials would be intact. I ordered a ninety-day moratorium on any eviction for nonpayment of rent due to lack of income from being laid off or furloughed from work. People would have a place to live. I also ordered that no public utilities could be turned off. People would have electricity and phone service. We announced the state would establish emergency food banks so no one would go hungry. We also announced that unemployment benefits would be immediately available so that people would have money in their pockets.

  Later in the day, I spoke to both the vice president and the president about our ongoing testing needs, and they finally approved New York’s request made earlier in the week to be able to approve any lab in the state to do COVID testing—a real breakthrough that practically took the FDA out of the lab-approval equation for New York. This enabled us to start activating our network of 250 local labs across the entire state, a game changer particularly months later, when long lag times from the major national labs slowed down the reporting of test
results. This Friday we had hit our goal of a thousand tests a day, and with the ability to activate our local labs ourselves, we set a new testing goal for the next week: six thousand a day. We would beat this goal, hitting ten thousand tests a day by March 20, and would be doing twenty thousand tests a day by the beginning of April. But critical days had been lost as we sought federal approval.

  On Friday, March 13, Roche’s fully automated test was approved by the FDA. As other governors and elected officials scrambled to get in line to buy a Roche machine, New York was already on our way, installing the new machines we had secured earlier from Roche that days later would be doing thousands of tests per day. Bizarrely, at the White House press conference when President Trump announced that the FDA had approved Roche’s fully automated system, he noted the approval would allow “1.4 million tests on board next week and 5 million within a month. I doubt we’ll need anywhere near that.” The comment underscored the skepticism from the very top about the seriousness of the virus and was a reiteration of Trump’s stated belief that this would just “go away.” Laboratory capacity was only one element. We needed testing sites for people to get swabbed in every corner of the state, more testing equipment, and a steady supply of collection kits and testing reagents, and we would also have to enlist and coordinate all the local departments of health in every county of the state. It was going to be a nightmare, period.

  That day, the federal government also declared COVID a national emergency, after outbreaks of cases in more than twenty states, and two days after the World Health Organization affirmed we were in the midst of a pandemic.

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  SOMETIMES, THE DAY’S EVENTS required a second briefing. I wanted to publicly thank the president for allowing us to increase our testing capacity because I knew he needed to hear my gratitude if we were going to continue to work together. I was also beginning to suspect that there were thousands of cases of COVID we didn’t know about because our testing was so limited. It was then that I shared my personal testing saga.

  My three daughters are Cara, Mariah, and Michaela. Cara and Mariah are twins, twenty-five years old, and Michaela is twenty-two. Cara and Mariah graduated from college two years ago and were living in Manhattan and starting their professional careers pre-COVID. Michaela was to be graduating from Brown this year. I am blessed to say that I have a beautiful relationship with all three. It is true what they say. The years from about fifteen to about twenty-one can have their challenges, but sanity eventually returns: for both parents and children.

  Cara called me and said one of her mother’s friends tested positive for COVID. And the wheels began to turn. Michaela was still at school in Rhode Island but came back and forth to see me in Albany. Cara and Mariah went back and forth and saw me often as well. The detective work of contact tracing fell to me. First, we needed to get my ex-wife, Kerry, Cara’s mother, tested, because she had definitely been in contact with a positive person and that was the protocol. In the meantime, those people in contact with Kerry needed to be quarantined.

  After several conversations involving exquisite cross-examination, I learned that Cara had also been in contact with Kerry’s friend. Cara didn’t tell me that in the first conversation, because it was a fleeting contact that she didn’t consider significant. But when you don’t know exactly how the virus transmits, there is no way of telling what an “incidental” contact is.

  Cara had to be quarantined for two weeks alone in her Manhattan apartment. She was not happy about this and considered it the “heavy hand of big government,” which is even more complicated when the heavy hand belongs to your father. This experience showed me how difficult and disruptive quarantine would be for an individual. Two weeks alone in an apartment is a big deal. We were two weeks from our first case. No quarantine of any scale had been put in place in more than a hundred years. Let’s just say it took numerous conversations to convince Cara that she needed to comply, and I could just imagine how hard this was going to be when we were trying to get thousands of people to quarantine when I did not have the advantage of the parental pulpit, however minimal that may be.

  I called Michaela, who was at Brown, and she said she had just been with her mother the day before. While Cara was adamant that she was fine and this was all unnecessary, Michaela went the other way. COVID, in many ways, is a Rorschach test: Different personalities respond differently. It turned out that after Michaela had been with her mother, she had five other friends over to her apartment for the evening. She was worried that maybe her mother infected her and that Michaela had infected her five friends. I tried to calm Michaela and tell her that her mother was being tested and we would know in two days and then we would decide what to do.

  Michaela did not want to wait two days, so she contacted all five friends immediately and told them to assume that they had the COVID virus. The five friends then got on the telephone and communicated with all the people they had been in contact with. They were college students and attending class, so I’m sure those calls involved dozens of people. Michaela was distraught and said she would stay in home quarantine and wait for the results of her mother’s test.

  I then called Mariah. Her reaction was to be upset that she had been subjected to the situation through no fault of her own. She was surprised by the randomness of the circumstances and was not happy. Mariah wanted to get tested immediately and have definitive answers. The fear of the unknown and the loss of control this virus spreads truly wreak havoc.

  The person I was most concerned about was Cara because she had direct contact with a positive person. Given the incubation period, the fourteen-day quarantine was the smartest path. I would talk to Cara a couple of times a day. She watched my briefings because she had little else to do and was literally a captive audience. COVID now had her full attention. It felt so unnatural for me to have a daughter in distress and not be able to do anything to help her—to not even be with her, not be able to see her and hug her, and to know that she was alone.

  Meanwhile, my mother, Matilda, is eighty-nine years young and in a vulnerable population for the coronavirus. I hadn’t been able to see her since this started. Although I’m careful, my job puts me in contact with many people, and I would never want to infect her.

  She had been living on her own since my father passed, with home health aides coming to help out, but that became a risk in itself, because the aides could bring the infection in. So starting in early March, she alternated going back and forth staying with my sisters, Maria, Madeline, and Margaret, a doctor.

  Every day I called her, and every day she asked, “When is this going to end?” It’s not that she didn’t like staying with my sisters; she just wanted to be in her own home. She wanted her independence. Like so many people at the beginning of this crisis, she had a hard time comprehending how serious the threat was.

  My sisters would tell her, “Andrew says you can’t go home yet, it’s too dangerous.” I understood why they would blame me: I wasn’t in the room!

  My mother would say, “I’ll be careful. I don’t have to be here. I want to go home.”

  I would insist, but I had to strike a delicate balance. In her book a son doesn’t have the right to tell his mother what to do. Nor is she that impressed with the concept of a “governor” as having any special authority over her, be it a husband or a son. My mother can still be very tough. I learned New York tough from her and my dad.

  I knew many people were having similar conversations with their own parents, and I communicated that in my briefings. It was another way we were all in this fight together.

  This is the cruel torture of COVID. Patients alone in hospitals, seniors alone in nursing homes, disabled people alone in group homes. Yes, it was for the best, but it is a terrible human toll. Can you imagine being in a hospital emergency room not knowing whether you will live or die, no family around you, and the nurses and doctors you
see are wearing so much protective equipment that you can’t even make out their faces? Terrifying, but that’s what so many people experienced and continue to live through.

  Because I grew up the oldest male in an Italian house with my three sisters, my instinct is to protect. My father was not around much; he worked all the time. And I mean all the time—seven days a week from when I was a child. He left in the morning before we woke up for school and came home after we were asleep. Sunday evenings he was supposed to be home by seven to have dinner. Even that deadline was often missed. Because of that, I was always rigorous about making time for my kids. When they were with me, I would be home by 5:00 P.M. I’d often drive back and forth from Albany to Westchester in a single day to see them.

  My mother and my sisters relied on me. With my three daughters now, my natural orientation has never changed. I have to be careful how I express things because my daughters are always setting traps for me to fall into so they can accuse me of “paternalism,” which is totally impolitic now. In my family, the line between parental responsibility and female empowerment must constantly be navigated.

  While Cara is twenty-five years old, a Harvard graduate who has traveled the world and is smarter than I am, she is still my daughter. Cara is independent and resourceful. She is a strong, principled personality and has a great, dry sense of humor. I would say that she got it from me, but that would offend her. She also has an infectious laugh. There was no logical reason why she was not totally capable of handling this situation, or any situation, herself. Cara, more than the other two, bristles at my overprotective tendencies. I did the same with my father. But emotions are not logical. I felt powerless to help her, and it hurt me. At my briefings, I talked about how this saddened me and frightened me at the same time.