American Crisis

by Andrew Cuomo

  And despite growing public awareness of the severity of the situation, we were still fielding complaints from people who were upset that their favorite restaurants and bars and gyms were closed. I made it clear that people shouldn’t be upset with their local officials. They should be upset with me; I made these decisions in the best interests of the entire state.

  MARCH 19 | 1,769 NEW CASES | 617 HOSPITALIZED | 22 DEATHS

  “It is a war in many ways and government has to mobilize as if it is a war.”

  PROVIDING ESSENTIAL SECURITY FOR FAMILIES continued to be a major concern. We needed to assure them that their basic way of life would be maintained until we got through this. I had previously ordered a ninety-day moratorium on rent eviction, and now I signed an executive order giving all homeowners a ninety-day grace period from any mortgage payments. If a homeowner was suffering a financial hardship from COVID, the bank must allow a ninety-day forbearance. The banks would eventually get their money, but no family would be unnecessarily displaced.

  You hear about the isolation of leadership. Now I understood it. In the heat of battle, one must make decisions seeing the full field and the entire context. Many observers and pundits bring only a particular perspective and therefore find it easy to criticize, but I tried to hold every scenario and every concern in my head at every moment. We needed to slow the virus spread. There was no way our hospital system could manage the volume every model had projected. The nightmare of people dying in hospital corridors we were seeing in Italy loomed. We would have to move heaven and earth to create more hospital beds faster than any state in the nation, but it still would not be enough. Therefore, we needed to reduce the viral spread more than any of the experts thought was possible.

  The “closedown” strategies, theoretically, could do just that: reduce activity and reduce the spread. But it wasn’t that simple. Pundits will say in hindsight that we should have closed earlier. But they are missing an important point. Government can announce drastic and dramatic policies to close down and reduce activity. The intelligent question was, would people follow them? It is naïve to think that government could order the most dramatic behavior change in modern history and assume all people would salute and follow the order. This is not China. This government has no ability to enforce closedown rules on 19.5 million people. State government has only about six thousand troopers, and local governments’ ability or desire to use their police to enforce unpopular directives is uneven at best. As we would learn, government couldn’t even keep young people from gathering at bars! Compliance would be essentially voluntary. Mask wearing, social distancing, and stay-at-home orders would have to be socially accepted. The public would need to agree that the policies were necessary, which means they had to be educated to that realization.

  Further compounding the challenge was that we had to inform them of the drastic consequences without panicking them. The calibration needed to be exquisitely balanced. Panic and chaos would be harder to manage than COVID. The information had to be communicated in a measured way, but quickly. Also, “government” writ large was offering mixed messages. The federal government was saying that COVID was not a major threat, so why would the public accept drastic action? One message from me and a different message from Trump could create a political divide. I had to first earn the trust of the public and gain unprecedented credibility to overcome the intense politics and mixed messages of the time. I studied other governments’ actions. California had fifty days to socialize the notion of a shutdown to the public after its first case. That was a long time. I didn’t have that luxury. I would need to move faster.

  Communicating facts and authenticity, and taking daily incremental closedown actions correlated to the new information on the increasing threat: every day more cases announced, every day ratcheting a closedown. I closed down 50 percent of nonessential workers, then 75 percent. On March 20, only nineteen days from our first case, we announced a 100 percent closedown. People virtually unanimously supported it, and compliance was nearly universal. It was truly incredible.

  In retrospect, I wonder if I could have accomplished achieving credibility with the public and getting them to understand the need to close down even faster than nineteen days. The truth is, I will never know. The stakes couldn’t have been higher. The risk was that if I announced closedown orders before the public was ready to support them and they rejected them, all would be lost—we would be worse off. Once the public lost trust in me or disregarded my proposals, the entire effort would be derailed. I believe I moved as quickly as I believed and felt I could, given the balance I needed to maintain, but it is impossible to know.

  The risk of losing the public cannot be underestimated. In the end, we did what many thought was impossible, faster than any government had done it at the time, and faster and more effectively than any of the experts thought we could. Amen.

  MARCH 20 | 2,950 NEW CASES | 1,042 HOSPITALIZED | 8 DEATHS

  “When we look back at this situation ten years from now, I want to be able to say to the people of New York, I did everything we could do.”

  COVID LITERALLY AND FIGURATIVELY CHANGED the entire atmosphere of social interaction. You couldn’t shake hands and were afraid to touch another human being. Our team couldn’t sit in meetings together or share a meal. We conducted meeting after meeting on Zoom, but it’s not the same as a human interchange. People had to think before they touched the doorknob. No one knew when and where the enemy would strike again. While we were being careful in my operation, my first priority was to get the job done, and I couldn’t do that in a hermetically sealed bubble. Nor did I want to. It was important for me to try to project a sense of normalcy, even though that was far from what we were experiencing. My staff and the press who covered us were already nervous after two members of the New York State Assembly had tested positive the weekend before.

  That Friday at 5:15 A.M., my phone rang. It was Melissa.

  “We have a situation, but I want to start off by saying that I’m calm and everyone is calm, and it’s all going to be fine,” she said, the tone of her voice suggesting that the person she was trying to reassure was herself.

  “It’s Caitlin,” she said. Caitlin Girouard, our press secretary, was primarily based out of New York City but had spent the last several days in Albany as part of the all-hands-on-deck effort.

  “Caitlin? What’s wrong with Caitlin?” I asked.

  “Well, really it’s the whole press office, but primarily it’s Caitlin,” Melissa continued. I could hear the panic in her voice. “She wasn’t feeling well yesterday afternoon, so Peter [Peter Ajemian, our loyal and reliable deputy communications director] sent her home. I thought he was being dramatic, but agreed it was better to be safe than sorry.”

  I cut her off. “And what information do we have now that we didn’t have yesterday afternoon?”

  “Last night, she had a fever. So Dr. Zucker thought it was best that she take a coronavirus test; the test came back positive around 11:00 last night, but to be absolutely sure Dr. Zucker had them do a second test.”

  “Okay, and?”

  “And it was negative. So there we are. And yes, we are having her tested a third time to find out exactly what is going on. We don’t know at this moment definitively if she is sick or not. That being said, for the last several days she has been sitting in the press office, which, as you know, could generously be described as a sardine can, with nine other staffers,” she continued at a frenetic pace.

  “The belief is that if she got sick, it happened over the weekend when she was in New York City. I’ve carefully retraced your movements and my movements for the past four days, and the reality is that neither of us has been near her, but I’ve spoken with Dr. Zucker, and he thinks, again, out of an abundance of caution—just out of an abundance of caution—we have to quarantine every single person in the press office and a handful of the advance staff who she came into contact
with. So there it is—you know everything I know.”

  “Okay, deep breath. I’ll be in the office in fifteen minutes.”

  By the time I arrived in the office a few minutes later, it was clear the staff had been up all night. Linda Lacewell, one of my longest-serving aides based in New York City who had recently been parked on the second floor of the capitol to help manage the crisis, had already put a wave of new protocols into motion. Linda is a former federal prosecutor who worked with me in the attorney general’s office. As a lawyer, she has a rare combination of talents: facility with the law and with managing people. After the attorney general’s office, she had left to take a great gig in her home state of California. A few months after her departure I called her up and said, “You have to come back, I really need you.” She came. If you understood the bond that we develop working together the way we do, you wouldn’t be surprised. I work with a group of people who would do anything for one another, and they do.

  * * *

  —

  LINDA HAD CREATED a list of staff people deemed “essential,” who were permitted to work from inside the capitol, and another much more modest list of staff labeled “essential essential,” who were allowed to enter the contained suite of offices connecting my office, Melissa’s office, the conference room, and the Red Room. A crew of maintenance staff would arrive by 7:00 A.M. to clean surfaces.

  That morning represented a critical juncture in other ways as well. It was about communicating to 19.5 million people that the virus had reached a point of spread that required dramatic action; I was asking New Yorkers to stay home. And I was, by extension, telling millions of them that they were about to lose their jobs. Today wasn’t about me or my staff’s behind-the-scenes drama. Today was about delivering truly tough news to New Yorkers and hoping they would follow it. We would see if the public really trusted me and were ready to sacrifice.

  The sudden increase in cases was jarring, and the progression of the incremental actions had reached a climax. It was time to announce New York State on PAUSE (the acronym stood for Policies Assure Uniform Safety for Everyone), which banned all nonessential gatherings, established social distancing requirements, and closed 100 percent of nonessential businesses. We had already started the process gradually, so people could get used to the idea.

  Closing down society is easier said than done, and many politicians didn’t appreciate the complexity of the issue. First, you can’t close down until you have all the precautions in place and have thought through all the ramifications. Closing down is not a press release; it’s the most complex government policy we have ever instituted. Necessary functions must continue or you risk anarchy. Contact must be made with all the main system operators so they know what is coming and are prepared for it. If a closedown order is going to impact the workforce or management of an essential system, you’d better know in advance.

  Second, the public must comply, and that means they have to be socialized prior to the announcement through a gradual process that communicates the increasingly dire nature of the situation. Communicating the seriousness haphazardly causes panic, but communicating it incompletely causes people to refuse to follow the order. Again, New York’s closedown accomplished these prerequisites within only nineteen days. And it had never been done before.

  After we made the announcement on Friday the twentieth, we had two days to decide what exactly was “essential” versus “nonessential” before the order went into effect on Sunday. In government, we use these terms during events like snowstorms, when travel is perilous. You don’t want people on the roads, but the government needs to operate, so who are the most essential people to allow the government to do its work? Everyone else stays home.

  But now we were dealing with the entire private sector. I sat at my conference room table with Melissa as well as Robert Mujica, the state budget director, and other members of my team to go through a list of industries, one sector at a time, deciding which businesses were so “essential” they could not be closed. As budget director, Robert does all finances for the state. He is a sphinx. The man’s face never moves. He is inscrutable and unrelenting, and as tough a negotiator as I have ever encountered. Robert is not a pol, he’s a pro, and he manages the state finances almost single-handedly.

  The decisions weren’t always obvious.

  I was inclined to close as near to everything as possible, because every person who had to go to work was putting their life at risk and I wasn’t going to ask that of one more worker than I absolutely had to. On the flip side, we were also deciding who was about to lose their jobs. There are, for example, more than 100,000 employees of gyms in New York State. Gyms were about as high risk as they come and would likely be closed for a long time.

  Food, health care, pharmacies, and supply chain industries were essential; that was easy. But when Robert argued that dry cleaners were essential, I thought he was crazy. There’s nothing essential about dry cleaning. “You’re just saying that because you don’t want to do your own laundry,” I teased him. But the truth is, as he explained it, police and other uniformed personnel need dry cleaners for their uniforms, so they stay open. Verizon stores were essential because people need to be able to repair or replace broken cellphones. I objected to liquor stores staying open, but I was overruled, the argument being we had to be consistent about food and beverage businesses; if you could sell beer at a convenience store, then liquor stores should be allowed to stay open. That was also why we changed the law to allow restaurants offering takeout to offer alcoholic beverages, which had the added advantage of making people a little happier being stuck at home.

  As dramatic as New York PAUSE was, the facts had led to the inescapable conclusion. I did not have to convince the people of the state. I believed they would have taken the same action if it were put to a vote. There were still voices in opposition, primarily those on the Far Right. Trump was fanning the flames against government and business closures. But the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers—Democrats and Republicans—knew where we were and what we must do. Closing down the state through the New York PAUSE order was accomplishing the first essential task: communicating the extent of the problem, the urgency, and solidifying New Yorkers’ support for my plan to accomplish mission impossible.

  Aside from asking everyone who could stay home to do exactly that, I implemented Matilda’s Law, named after my mother and directed at seniors like her and everyone else in a vulnerable population, which limited home visitation to immediate family members or close friends in order to protect them. In a way, this law felt like a culmination of the daily conversations I had with my mother explaining how we were trying to keep her safe.

  During the briefing that day, the main message I wanted to convey was the need for everyone to be safe, and that the only way to do that was together. The human toll all of this was taking was never far from my thoughts. “People are in a small apartment,” I said at the briefing, my voice breaking with the emotion of it. “They’re in a house, they’re worried, they’re anxious. Just be mindful of that. Those three-word sentences can make all the difference. I miss you, I love you, I’m thinking of you, I wish I was there with you, I’m sorry you’re going through this, I’m sorry we’re going through this. That’s going to be a situation that’s going to develop because we’re all in quarantine now.” It was a very emotional moment for me, and it was later reported that I shed a tear. I do know that I welled up with emotion that day.

  I also needed to strike the right balance between disclosing to the public the potential of someone in our office having coronavirus while still protecting that person’s privacy and not overhyping what could just as easily come back with a negative result.

  At the end of the briefing, as I began to get up from my chair, I dropped the news that a member of our press office was exhibiting signs of coronavirus, adding that we would be quarantining employees of the entire office.r />
  Looking back, I’m not sure it was the most artful way to disclose that information, particularly to a group of reporters who had spent the last twenty days huddled in the Red Room with my press staff, but as we had been learning, sometimes there didn’t seem to be a “right way” to do anything.

  It felt as if the ground were shifting beneath us. The final test on Caitlin came back that she was COVID positive. The virus could infect anyone, and its reach did not discriminate. And regardless of perceived power or access, with too few tests and even less information, our entire press office would be quarantined for the next fourteen days.

  The burden I asked people to shoulder—quarantining as a precaution after coming into contact with a positive case—was now one my entire press team would experience every day for the next two weeks. By talking about this publicly, I wanted to show New Yorkers that I was in that journey with them, experiencing it, feeling it, suffering it, just as they were. They say relationships take work. My relationship with the people of the state was vital, and I was willing to put in the work.