by Andrew Cuomo
Citizens from all walks of life reached out in the tens of thousands, through emails, calls, Instagram messages, all asking, “How can I help?” I did a briefing from a hospital in Syracuse on April 28. When I drove up and parked, there was a semicircle of at least four hundred nurses and doctors, all holding signs and cheering. I walked by, staying a safe fifteen feet away, waving, taking in this incredible energy. It was moments like that, and they happened all over the state, that made me realize all New Yorkers were in this together. It gave me great strength to go on.
One letter I received touched me so much that I actually teared up while reading it at my desk. I later read it at a briefing. A farmer in Kansas wrote saying he had watched our daily briefings, saw what was happening in New York, and was compelled to help. He said he had five leftover N95 masks from his farming days. His wife had only one lung, so he was keeping four masks, but he sent one mask for a doctor or nurse in New York. Wow. I read the letter at the briefing and never gave his full name, but a reporter somehow tracked down the farmer and wrote an article about it. After the article appeared, the governor of Kansas called the farmer, Dennis Ruhnke, to thank him, and that generated more press. Ultimately, the head of Kansas State University contacted the farmer. It turned out the farmer never graduated because he left college to care for his mother and the family farm after his father died. Kansas State gave him his degree, and he spoke at the commencement. How beautiful in the midst of such agony. I called Mr. Ruhnke to congratulate him and his humility overwhelmed me. He was so grateful for all the kindness that had been shown to him, and I don’t think he fully appreciated the kindness he himself had shown. He was doing what he assumed was the right response to the circumstance, and that is what made it so special.
APRIL 27 | 3,951 NEW CASES | 12,819 HOSPITALIZED | 337 DEATHS
“Life is going to be different.”
THE USNS COMFORT SAILED OUT of New York Harbor a month after it arrived. The ship cared for about two hundred patients. The right-wing press was mocking us because it had barely been used. This was a perfect snapshot of the bizarre and incongruous situation. The truth is this: I had never asked for the USNS Comfort. I had never thought of asking for a hospital ship. I asked for the Javits Center to be built, and I was the first one to suggest to the president the use of the Army Corps of Engineers. Sending the USNS Comfort was the president’s idea. He sent two ships—the USNS Comfort to the East Coast and the USNS Mercy to the West Coast. Why? Because they were the ultimate photo opportunity. Large white ships emblazoned with a red cross in the middle, designed to be visible for miles. The president is a marketing man. He anticipated the media feeding frenzy watching the Comfort sail into New York Harbor. It would be a tremendous visual display of the president’s assistance. The president was so excited about it that he actually left the White House to go to Norfolk, Virginia, to bring the press to see the Comfort off. One ship for the East Coast, one ship for the West Coast, they were the two most impactful press releases that the White House has ever issued.
Furthermore, all our efforts on providing emergency field beds whether on the Comfort or in the Javits Center were preparations for the worst-case scenario. Any intelligent strategy says “prepare for the worst and hope for the best.” All experts and the president’s own projection models said we would need additional beds beyond our current hospital capacity. By these models, even with the Comfort, the Javits Center, and all other emergency beds we provided, we were still tens of thousands of beds short of the maximum need. We never reached the maximum need because New Yorkers did a better job of “flattening the curve” than any experts had predicted. It was a tremendous success. Any informed person would have said, “Thank God we didn’t need the Comfort!” If the president was smarter on the issue, he should have claimed success in flattening the curve and reducing the need because that was the substantive success. The CDC projections, the Peter Navarro memo, Dr. Birx’s projections, all pointed to a need for 110,000 to 140,000 hospital beds. We flattened the curve such that our hospital need never went beyond 18,875. That was an accomplishment beyond anyone’s wildest predictions.
The irony is that the states that followed Trump’s guidelines would also end up beating projections—in the opposite direction—and the administration would have to constantly revise their projections upward. The numbers were irrefutable. How could Americans continue down this road? How did we not see the cliff?
APRIL 30 | 4,681 NEW CASES | 11,598 HOSPITALIZED | 306 DEATHS
“Nobody ever said it was going to be easy. But nobody ever said it was going to be this hard, either.”
NEW YORK CITY POSED MANY unique complications for reopening. The density and crowding was an aggravating factor in the spread of the virus, and public transportation in New York makes it extraordinarily difficult to socially distance. But a significant challenge for us was figuring out how to keep people who use subways and buses safe. The initial information from the experts was that the virus could live on a surface for up to two days, depending on the surface. Stainless steel was supposed to be one of the surfaces that allowed the virus to be the most viable for the longest period of time, and the interiors of buses and subway cars are largely stainless steel.
Cleaning the New York City subway system has been one of the city’s great challenges for the past hundred years. The system is one of the largest on the globe and the only system that operates 24/7. Over the past thirty years the subway system had become a permanent facility for the homeless. I had worked on the issue of homelessness since my twenties, and I have been continually frustrated by society’s gross failure to handle this issue. Once again we see the typical formula for failure in our society: political paralysis and government incompetence. Oh, but you say, you are the governor, why didn’t you fix it? Good question. Sometimes even the governor can’t fix it.
In New York City, homelessness is handled by City Hall and the NYPD. The mayor’s refusal to remove the homeless from the subways was making the problem worse instead of better. The subways were filthy and filled with homeless people. This is the dynamic not just in New York City but in urban areas all across the country. Homeless encampments have become urban fixtures. Why a so-called homeless advocate would support keeping human beings in subhuman conditions has always been perplexing to me. Why politicians would accept this position as “progressive” is also beyond me. Nonetheless, the advocates support the right of the homeless to live in the subways, and the mayor refused to have the NYPD remove them. The MTA and New York City have spent tens of millions of dollars on grants for nonprofits to “outreach” to the homeless with virtually no success. Now enter the COVID crisis. This wasn’t doing the homeless any favors, letting them stay on trains in the middle of a global health pandemic with no masks. In addition, crime was rising even as ridership had dropped 90 percent.
The subway system needed to operate throughout the COVID crisis because essential workers needed it to get to work. Essential workers—police, firefighters, health-care workers—were still using the system to get to their essential jobs, without which society would have collapsed. We were committed to doing everything we could to keep them safe. I still had not gotten over the responsibility I felt for calling out the “essential workers.” They were risking their lives and some had died. I would do everything in my power to keep them safe. That was my obligation to them. That meant that the subways had to be disinfected every night, which is something that hadn’t been done since the system began. It was almost a laughable concept.
First, I had to figure out if cleaning at this scale was even possible. MTA officials told me it was impossible because the system runs twenty-four hours a day and there are six thousand subway cars and they are filled with the homeless. We’d have to disinfect the entire interior of every car—every rail, every pole, every door, wherever a hand could touch or a cough or sneeze could land, wherever droplets could land. We’d also have to disinfect the sta
tions, the handrails, everything that people could be touching.
I personally spoke to a number of commercial cleaners about the application and safety of different chemicals. Some vendors suggested the use of ultraviolet light. Others proposed a new technology that could be sprayed on a surface to kill viruses for up to thirty days. While some of the technologies were experimental, I was convinced it could be done. To even try to accomplish this goal, we would need to do two things. First, stop the trains from running for several hours in the middle of the night to allow them to be cleaned. Second, homeless individuals and all their belongings would have to be out of every car and every station in the system.
This was going to be a monumental challenge. The homeless advocates would be outraged, city officials would balk, and the police and MTA workers would need to perform at a higher level than ever. But there was really no alternative because we couldn’t have people on the trains unless we knew they were safe. I moved forward, and the MTA and I identified the right cleaning contractors and chemicals. I told city officials I was doing this and if they wanted to oppose it, that would be their prerogative, but that I was confident the people of New York City would support me.
If we put out a plan and discussed it for weeks, it would get bogged down in political controversy. Once an issue becomes politically complicated in New York City, it slows, stalls, and then dies. Moreover, the essential workers were riding the subway every day and we needed to ensure it was safe—immediately. I told the MTA to just do it and blame me. And if the mayor wouldn’t allow the NYPD to cooperate, I would send in the state police to facilitate the plan. If the homeless advocates wanted to attack me, so be it. I was more than comfortable with my record supporting the homeless. I had worked to help the homeless all my adult life and all across the nation. I also believed getting the homeless off the trains and into shelters where they could receive the services they actually needed was the best way to help them.
We pushed the plan forward, and on April 30, Mayor de Blasio decided to support it and joined me for the daily briefing when I announced we were going to shut down the system for four hours every night between 1:00 A.M. and 5:00 A.M. when ridership was at the lowest, and we’d offer buses or for-hire vans to provide transport to any essential workers who needed to travel during this time. The entire system would be disinfected every twenty-four hours.
Our subway cleaning plan went into operation, and surprise, surprise, it delivered as promised. Every subway car and bus is disinfected every twenty-four hours, and the subway system is cleaner and safer than it has ever been. It took the COVID crisis to clean the New York City subway system and to really help the homeless. Pat Foye, the MTA chairman, and Sarah Feinberg, the MTA president, did a really great job.
It was an important lesson for me and for New Yorkers. We can still do big, bold things; we just have to dare to try. Any New Yorker will tell you that the conditions of the trains, subway cars, and subway stations have been unacceptable for many decades. The plight of the homeless in the subway was a daily reminder of urban deterioration and human suffering. Most New Yorkers had given up. It made no sense, but it seemed impossible to change. The idea of disinfecting the system was almost ludicrous. If you couldn’t clean the system, how could it now be disinfected? No one believed it was possible. They were wrong. Nothing is impossible. You just have to be willing to try.
MAY 1 | 3,942 NEW CASES | 10,993 HOSPITALIZED | 289 DEATHS
“Our past actions changed the path’s trajectory. Our present actions will determine the future trajectory. You tell me what we do today; I will tell you the number of people sick tomorrow.”
NEW YORK’S CASES WERE DROPPING while many other states were still in denial, embracing the president’s rhetoric rather than following the facts and science. The president’s “liberate” supporters were demonstrating across the nation and across New York State. Everyone wanted out of the house, and everyone wanted to get back to work.
I have learned something as I have gotten older: Ultimately, the truth wins out. I was more impatient as a young man and wanted to cut to the chase immediately. But sometimes situations have to unfold. The president’s denial strategy was being exposed for the fraud it was even if his most devoted apostles were still with him. While the president had some early political success in selling his message of “liberation,” the virus was unimpressed and took its course. The president’s message was totally counter to science, and it was only a matter of time before the virus won.
Trump was very good at playing to emotion. Indeed, he became president by playing to people’s fear. He knew that he could increase political pressure on those politicians who were slower to reopen their states. It was a full-court press from the White House and all of Trump’s allies. They claimed they had polling information saying the public wanted to reopen immediately. I had no doubt that might be true. Of course people wanted to reopen immediately—so did I—but that didn’t mean it was right.
Trump sells the product most easily purchased by the largest number of people. In this case, “Let’s get back to life now” was essentially his slogan. However, it was also shortsighted and wrong. By now it was clear to me that a reckless reopening would increase the spread of the virus, which in the medium and long term would actually hurt the economy. Trump was playing a very irresponsible strategy of short-term gain for long-term pain. I didn’t even think that the gain would last until the election in November. But that was his calculus. And Americans would die on his gamble.
There was never a choice between public health and economic progress. The path forward always had to prioritize both. A plan that focused only on public health or only on economic progress was doomed to fail. And reopening only to see the virus increase would devastate the financial markets and further cause stock market decline. But I felt as if I were talking to myself. Everyone wanted to hear that we could reopen quickly. I wouldn’t say it or do it even if I risked losing public support. I believed this was a situation that would be judged by the history books rather than pundits. We had been to hell and back, and I was not willing to jeopardize our progress or dishonor the lives lost.
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SO MANY UNDERLYING problems had been exposed by COVID. Some of them would have to be solved immediately, or else they would inevitably recur. The PPE shortage was understandable only if one accepted that our government and health-care system were incompetent. Why didn’t our nation have the capacity to manufacture PPE as a matter of national security? Public health is a matter of national security.
I said publicly that the country should learn these lessons immediately and develop American industries that could provide all the materials lacking during COVID. With no response from the federal government, I announced that New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts would work together to develop a regional supply chain for PPE and medical equipment. Within our states we needed to have companies that could provide the necessities. Together we could form a purchasing coalition to support their development. COVID would come back for a second wave or some other virus would develop, and we needed to be in a better position than we were this time, and we had to start now.
It never made sense to me that New York’s own health-care system didn’t have a better supply. The hospital administrators said that they didn’t like to stockpile equipment or inventory as a general rule. I understood their point, but we now realized we needed a buffer. At my direction, the New York State Department of Health issued an order requiring all hospitals to have a ninety-day supply of PPE and nursing homes to have a sixty-day supply that they could access. We would not go through this again.
Necessity can also be the mother of invention, as the saying goes. Educators had been discussing remote learning for a long time. The technology has been available, but the bureaucracy has been slow to move and the status quo is protected. Higher edu
cation has made more progress on remote learning. A professor of international distinction can teach a course in the United Kingdom that can be broadcast to students around the world. Why couldn’t we have that for New York’s nearly three million K–12 students? I understand the advantage of the in-class experience, but it doesn’t have to be one or the other. There is a benefit of having access to other opportunities offered by technology. Think of students at rural or disadvantaged high schools that might not be able to offer AP courses; remote learning would give those students access to more course offerings, which would improve their chances at the college level and improve their work opportunities later in life.
COVID forced an abrupt and imperfect transformation to remote learning. Wealthier school districts had more success in the conversion, while school districts with lower-income families had more difficulty. Remote learning requires internet access and computers at home, which people in public housing or rural areas might not have. We worked to put the infrastructure in place, including remote wireless hubs in certain communities.
I spoke to Bill Gates, who had been working in this area, about the opportunity presented by the COVID disruption. Gates agreed to work with New York through his foundation to help us develop a blueprint to “reimagine education” in the new normal.
Beyond the immediate crisis, I wanted to know how you could take the blueprint devised in these days of crisis and make it permanent and actually strengthen the system going forward so, like the subway system, we don’t just fall back to the old ways post-COVID. The future is still a question mark for now; we have issued guidance for school districts to follow if and when they reopen, because we have rural and urban communities with very different needs and populations.
