It appeared at the time that young people were relatively unaffected. But I knew too well that we didn’t really have all the facts and the conventional wisdom was false comfort because it was constantly evolving. This was an emotional experience that we were all going to go through. There is comfort in knowing you are not alone in your emotions. You can validate emotions without validating the fear. Easier said than done, but that’s where I needed to bring myself to be able to help other people get through this.
Luckily, the situation with Cara turned out fine. After several days of anxiety and fifty-seven telephone conversations, everyone was negative. Michaela had to call back her five friends, who then had to call back the dozens of people they contacted. The experience graphically illustrated for me how difficult this was going to be: the personal anxiety, the explosive expansion, the rush on testing, contact tracing, the anxiety of the unknown, the parental panic. For me, the lasting feeling was fear.
MARCH 14 | 164 NEW CASES | 117 HOSPITALIZED | 2 DEATHS
“Nobody believes there are only five hundred cases of coronavirus in New York today. We believe there are thousands of people who have coronavirus, maybe tens of thousands.”
EXACTLY TWO WEEKS AFTER OUR first case, we reported our first death from COVID-19—an eighty-two-year-old woman in Brooklyn with emphysema. The situation felt urgent in a whole new way, especially because it came right on the heels of the scare with my family. This was also the same day we closed the state capitol, because members of the assembly tested positive, and that sent shock waves through the whole government.
People around me were getting tested, and we were socially distanced from one another during meetings and in the Red Room. We changed the staffing around the governor’s suite. But the fear was everywhere. When someone handed me a document, I wondered, can I get COVID from paper?
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MY FATHER ONCE said to me that it’s hard to find a person who can come up with new good ideas, and it’s also hard to find a person who can implement good ideas. But it’s impossible to find a person who can do both. After all those sad conversations on the couch with him recounting our failures, I knew the right formula, impossible or not. It was doing both: doing the briefings in the morning and management efficiency in the afternoon.
Every day was developing the same rhythm, alternating between two main functions: communications and operations. Communications was preparing for the briefing, doing the presentation, answering the press questions. I had a great team, but not being able to gather all of the relevant people in a room and hold a proper face-to-face meeting was a real obstacle.
The operational issues were also hampered by the fact that the line where state responsibility ended and federal responsibility began was very unclear. And the federal government was not saying. Later, I realized they just didn’t know.
We were attempting to outline the entire system that would need to be in place to deal with the virus itself. Of course, there were secondary consequences driven by the economic fallout and social issues, but the first priority was to handle the pandemic. The medical response would start with intake facilities, testing facilities, quarantine facilities, hospital capacity, hospital equipment, and medical staff. Every element of the system posed a problem. Either the scale was nowhere near adequate, or it didn’t exist at all.
There were so many questions: How large would the universe of infected people be? How many people could be infected, and how many people would we need to treat? The challenge was driven by quantity, and we needed a number.
Several firms were doing projection models of the rate of infection. Models provided specific ranges and dates for the spread, the rate of transmission, the number of hospital beds needed, and the number of deaths anticipated. There were so many projections that we had hired the consulting firm McKinsey to review all the models and give us a workable range.
Modeling the spread of the virus is a little less precise than modeling weather patterns; at least forecasters can point out the number of variables. In the coronavirus projections, the variable was human behavior. There is more data available on wind patterns than on possible human responses.
The U.S. models had the advantage of being able to study the spread in the countries that went before us, like China, South Korea, Italy, and others in Europe, to get a sense of what was going to happen in the United States, and New York in particular. All the models were extrapolating out from the current viral transmission rate, and the main variable was how successful the closedown and social distancing policies would be. No one really knew, including me.
Every society is different, and our success was wholly dependent on what people themselves, rather than governments, chose to do. If people took the threat seriously, it would be one situation. If people were dismissive, there would be an entirely different outcome. In many ways the operational needs would be linked to my success in communication, because the more people were persuaded to follow our policy prescriptions, the lower the infection rate and the smaller the scale of our operations.
The White House Coronavirus Task Force had made a truly startling projection at the beginning of March, when the CDC suggested a minimum of 2.4
