I felt it was important to let people know that basic security was in place and life’s essentials would be intact. I ordered a ninety-day moratorium on any eviction for nonpayment of rent due to lack of income from being laid off or furloughed from work. People would have a place to live. I also ordered that no public utilities could be turned off. People would have electricity and phone service. We announced the state would establish emergency food banks so no one would go hungry. We also announced that unemployment benefits would be immediately available so that people would have money in their pockets.
Later in the day, I spoke to both the vice president and the president about our ongoing testing needs, and they finally approved New York’s request made earlier in the week to be able to approve any lab in the state to do COVID testing—a real breakthrough that practically took the FDA out of the lab-approval equation for New York. This enabled us to start activating our network of 250 local labs across the entire state, a game changer particularly months later, when long lag times from the major national labs slowed down the reporting of test results. This Friday we had hit our goal of a thousand tests a day, and with the ability to activate our local labs ourselves, we set a new testing goal for the next week: six thousand a day. We would beat this goal, hitting ten thousand tests a day by March 20, and would be doing twenty thousand tests a day by the beginning of April. But critical days had been lost as we sought federal approval.
On Friday, March 13, Roche’s fully automated test was approved by the FDA. As other governors and elected officials scrambled to get in line to buy a Roche machine, New York was already on our way, installing the new machines we had secured earlier from Roche that days later would be doing thousands of tests per day. Bizarrely, at the White House press conference when President Trump announced that the FDA had approved Roche’s fully automated system, he noted the approval would allow “1.4 million tests on board next week and 5 million within a month. I doubt we’ll need anywhere near that.” The comment underscored the skepticism from the very top about the seriousness of the virus and was a reiteration of Trump’s stated belief that this would just “go away.” Laboratory capacity was only one element. We needed testing sites for people to get swabbed in every corner of the state, more testing equipment, and a steady supply of collection kits and testing reagents, and we would also have to enlist and coordinate all the local departments of health in every county of the state. It was going to be a nightmare, period.
That day, the federal government also declared COVID a national emergency, after outbreaks of cases in more than twenty states, and two days after the World Health Organization affirmed we were in the midst of a pandemic.
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SOMETIMES, THE DAY’S EVENTS required a second briefing. I wanted to publicly thank the president for allowing us to increase our testing capacity because I knew he needed to hear my gratitude if we were going to continue to work together. I was also beginning to suspect that there were thousands of cases of COVID we didn’t know about because our testing was so limited. It was then that I shared my personal testing saga.
My three daughters are Cara, Mariah, and Michaela. Cara and Mariah are twins, twenty-five years old, and Michaela is twenty-two. Cara and Mariah graduated from college two years ago and were living in Manhattan and starting their professional careers pre-COVID. Michaela was to be graduating from Brown this year. I am blessed to say that I have a beautiful relationship with all three. It is true what they say. The years from about fifteen to about twenty-one can have their challenges, but sanity eventually returns: for both parents and children.
Cara called me and said one of her mother’s friends tested positive for COVID. And the wheels began to turn. Michaela was still at school in Rhode Island but came back and forth to see me in Albany. Cara and Mariah went back and forth and saw me often as well. The detective work of contact tracing fell to me. First, we needed to get my ex-wife, Kerry, Cara’s mother, tested, because she had definitely been in contact with a positive person and that was the protocol. In the meantime, those people in contact with Kerry needed to be quarantined.
After several conversations involving exquisite cross-examination, I learned that Cara had also been in contact with Kerry’s friend. Cara didn’t tell me that in the first conversation, because it was a fleeting contact that she didn’t consider significant. But when you don’t know exactly how the virus transmits, there is no way of telling what an “incidental” contact is.
Cara had to be quarantined for two weeks alone in her Manhattan apartment. She was not happy about this and considered it the “heavy hand of big government,” which is even more complicated when the heavy hand belongs to your father. This experience showed me how difficult and disruptive quarantine would be for an individual. Two weeks alone in an apartment is a big deal. We were two weeks from our first case. No quarantine of any scale had been put in place in more than a hundred years. Let’s just say it took numerous conversations to convince Cara that she needed to comply, and I could just imagine how hard this was going to be when we were trying to get thousands of people to quarantine when I did not
