Sitting at my father’s table, surrounded by these mementos, I was reminded of my father telling me that in the midst of the daily tumult, as difficult as things seemed in the moment, tomorrow will come. It also reminded me that it’s not about the destination; it’s about the journey. There will always be more to do. There will always be more to accomplish. There will always be more wrongs to right. But we do the best we can every day, and we are committed to the battle.
“A week ago, I said we’d be doing a thousand tests a day. How do we bring this to scale? Forget a thousand a day; we need to be doing ten thousand or more a day.”
Several people in the room looked at me as if I were asking for a cure for cancer by 10:00 that night. My role in meetings like this is to be the aggressive CEO. I have a policy I’ve named “constructive impatience,” which promotes an aggressive posture in problem identification and resolution. Unlike at the morning briefings when I was trying to be calm and assuring, in these meetings I was more activist and probing; in other words I could be a pain in the heinie. That’s why I called these meetings “peeling the onion.” They are to strip away issues to get to the essence of the matter, and someone usually cries in the end.
In large institutions and organizations, people often create a culture that is nonconfrontational and adopt a behavior of avoidance. That can be the enemy of problem solving when time is of the essence. The Department of Health’s senior team were all experienced long-term civil servants. They knew the state health regulations backward and forward. They had worked in the bureaucracy for years and were well versed in the culture. The Department of Health developed and promulgated regulations, but they were not known for rapid deployment or rigorous timelines. That mentality was incongruous with the skill set necessary to address COVID.
The FDA had approved Northwell to test after my Sunday visit and this afternoon had authorized just a handful of other labs—NewYork-Presbyterian, Memorial Sloan Kettering, University of Rochester Medical Center, Roswell Park, and SUNY Upstate Medical University—to test. But this was still not getting us to where we needed to be.
“How many labs do we have in New York State?” I asked. Again, blank stares. No one was sure. “About two hundred,” Dr. Ryan said. “How many of those labs can test for COVID?” Silence. Then Dr. Ryan spoke up with a suggestion. “Of the two hundred labs, there are about twenty-eight that are the ones we know and trust completely.”
I asked Melissa to put together a team to immediately go make phone calls to each lab. I have total confidence in Melissa, and it is a great luxury for me. I asked Dr. Zucker to call the FDA that night to ask for the ability for Wadsworth—not the FDA—to approve each of these labs to test, removing an unnecessary roadblock.
At the end of the meeting I said, “Well, one thing is clear: It’s up to us.”
MARCH 11 | 44 NEW CASES | 32 HOSPITALIZED | 0 DEATHS
“New York State is going to take matters into its own hands.”
WE ANNOUNCED THAT THE PUBLIC colleges would be closing for distance learning for the remainder of the semester. We’d already recalled students in study abroad programs; now teachers and administrators were nervous that students at upstate schools might be visiting family downstate for spring break, or hitting the beaches in Florida and Laguna Beach, and then unwittingly bring the virus back to campus. At first, we talked about moving up spring break, but we realized that we’d need to shut campuses down for two or four weeks at minimum, and there wasn’t much school year left anyway, so we said, “Forget it, let’s just close.”
Closing state colleges was my signal to private colleges that they should consider the same. Many people thought I was overreacting, but I would rather err on the side of caution. I would prefer to be blamed for unnecessary inconvenience than have to give condolences to the grieving parents of a dead student.
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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
