As an elected official, I’m less worried about political consequences and more worried about the governmental consequences. At times, my father and I had both made the mistake of focusing on the immediate politics of a situation, and I would not make it again. I am focused on the real-life effects that will be judged by the history books or judged by me when I’m sitting in my rocking chair explaining my actions to my grandchildren. I was not playing politics with COVID. All that mattered was that people would die or lives would be saved.
The Speaker of the assembly, Carl Heastie, and the senate majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins, are good politicians, and they are also responsible government leaders. They knew what needed to be done and how we needed to do it. I told them that I would not be taking significant actions without consulting them; our relationship had proven productive for the state in the past and would again.
The day after our first COVID case, the legislature passed the law giving the governor emergency powers to handle the crisis. If the legislature had not passed the law, I would not have had the power to do what I would soon do. There would be no executive order closing businesses or schools, no order requiring masks or social distancing. The legislature still retained their authority, and they could override any executive order with a simple majority vote. The law was smart, and it has proven successful. It might not have been politically smart for me, because it made me personally responsible for all the difficult decisions ahead.
MARCH 6 | 22 NEW CASES | 5 HOSPITALIZED | 0 DEATHS
“I’m urging reality. I’m urging a factual response as opposed to an emotional response.”
AFTER THE FOURTH OR FIFTH day of briefings, I knew that I would be doing them every day for the foreseeable future. I stuck to the format, because I thought consistency of presentation was effective and offered its own kind of comfort to viewers; they knew what to expect. That’s why we tried to do our briefings at the same time every day, unlike the chaotic and rambling briefings the White House staged at varying times. Our briefings were at 11:30 A.M., and generally I could be back in the office at about 1:30 P.M. Then the operational focus began.
On Friday, March 6, while New York still had very limited testing capacity, we could test beyond the restrictive criteria that the CDC had put out. I announced in my press conference who would be eligible, including New Yorkers with symptoms who had traveled from hot-spot parts of the globe and contacts of known positive cases. Later that day, almost as if in response, President Trump, while touring the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, said that “anyone who wants to get a test can get a test.” Of course, this was not true and sowed further chaos and confusion, and our social media team had to work overtime to clarify who was actually able to get a test in New York State.
By this point, we had put together the New York State Interagency Task Force to focus on testing priorities, quarantine, and containment tracking, including our health commissioner, Dr. Zucker, and three of my all-stars: Linda Lacewell, superintendent of the Department of Financial Services; Gareth Rhodes, deputy superintendent and special counsel of the Department of Financial Services; and Simonida Subotic, deputy secretary for economic development. Simonida went to Wadsworth to oversee their work to increase capacity. Linda focused on the daily reporting and monitoring hot spots. Gareth focused on building lab capacity.
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THERE WAS NO blueprint for this undertaking. No governor had faced this challenge. But in some ways it was basic. For me, it was about developing a relationship, and a relationship is based on trust and trust comes from the truth. If they did not trust my credibility, they would not trust me, the information I gave them, or my proposals. The same way I cannot deliver a speech that I have not written because the words must be mine, I would not be effective in communicating the facts of COVID if I didn’t understand them, and I didn’t know if I could learn them quickly enough. We consulted with experts from many different organizations, hoping to find consensus to guide us. These included researchers from the WHO, for the international perspective; the public health school at Drexel University in Philadelphia; the SUNY Albany research center that works with the Department of Health; the renowned modelers from Imperial College in England; and global experts including Dr. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. It was a great network of people who were all doing this for free.
Unfortunately, every expert had a different position on the “facts.” My goals were to speak to all of them and to ask the questions savvy New Yorkers would ask. To research the actions of other countries to determine what worked and what didn’t work. To research past pandemics to see what we could learn.
I then presented what I’d learned to the people in a totally transparent manner because I knew long before this crisis happened that trust has to be earned, competence must be proven, credibility must be established. The briefings needed to do that.
The founding fathers were right: Government can be an instrument for social progress. If that foundation is successfully created, there is no limit to what society can achieve. However, the founding fathers assumed public trust and government competence. Today we live in a hyper-partisan divided world with so much of our “news” and information coming from biased sources. We get conservative facts from Republican news channels, or we get liberal facts
