Governor Cuomo recently tore into the Trump administration’s response to the COVID epidemic:
“This was a colossal blunder, how this COVID was handled by this government,” Cuomo told reporters in New York City. “Shame on all of you,” Cuomo said of the Trump administration.
https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Cuomo-Trump-COVID-19-response-worst-government-15454992.php
My observation is that Cuomo’s own history includes plenty of blunders at least in retrospect. New York started by down-playing the seriousness of the disease in early March, followed by locking down the state on March 22. At the same time that the lockdown was killing the economy, the continued operation of crowded trains and buses allowed the disease to spread rapidly. In New York City the results were some of the highest infection rates in the world.
Arguably the most egregious action was the decision to force nursing homes to take infected patients. New York’s decision was followed by several other states with Democratic governors. These decisions probably resulted in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths in nursing homes and retirement communities.
Back in late March, Trump floated the idea of a federal quarantine of the New York area to reduce of the spread of the disease. Cuomo immediately threatened lawsuits and complained bitterly about any restrictions on travel by New Yorkers:
I don’t even know what that means. I don’t know how that could be legally enforceable. And from a medical point of view, I don’t know what you’d be accomplishing. . . Mandatory quarantine is a scary concept, because it sounds like you’re saying to people can’t leave this district. We never did that. –Governor Cuomo, March 2020
For background see:
The CDC director recently said that travelers from New York and other areas of the Northeast were a likely source for new infections in much of the rest of the US.
Meanwhile, New York along with Connecticut and New Jersey are imposing a mandatory quarantine for travelers from a long list of states, which is exactly the sort of action that Cuomo bitterly criticized back in March:
The criteria for being on the list of states for mandatory quarantines is 10 new cases per 100,000 in the last week. New York state’s rate is at 20; what possible use is this quarantine? In addition to the obvious hypocrisy, is this quarantine even constitutional?
Is the Trump administration’s biggest failing is that it allowed Cuomo to blunder and spread the disease without a federal quarantine of the New York area?
Should Cuomo look in the mirror if he is really searching for responsible parties for the severity of the COVID epidemic?