I do a lot of work with Governor Murphy and Governor Lamont, and they are both good men. Last year I invited Lamont to go salmon fishing with me on Lake Ontario. In addition to the opportunity to spend some time together away from meetings, the trip was meant to highlight the great fishing in upstate New York. We chartered a boat, and we planned a brief chat with the press when we got back to the dock.
It was getting close to the time that we were supposed to return, but we had a major problem: We hadn’t caught any fish. And there was no way I was going back to face the press on the dock without fish. I told the captain showing up empty-handed would be bad news for the state of New York, and he knew that it would not be great for his business either. I was ready to jump overboard and dive down to see what I could find. Luckily, we landed a fish before I had to do that. But one fish isn’t really enough for two fishermen. We needed another one. The press was already waiting on the dock, but I was committed to that second fish.
Miraculously, as we were pulling in to harbor, we saw the pole bend and the line take off; we caught our second fish. The poor charter boat captain was so relieved I thought he was going to cry.
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WHILE WE WERE making this progress at the state level, we were still operating in the absence of federal leadership and coordination, and that day Trump went as far as to tweet, “Just had a very good tele-conference with Nation’s Governors. Went very well. Cuomo of New York has to ‘do more.’ ” I tweeted right back, “I have to do more? No—YOU have to do something! You’re supposed to be the President.”
The president had finally instituted a partial European travel ban on March 12. But it was too little, too late. The virus had been silently circulating in the New York region for weeks, if not months. If the federal authorities had realized this basic reality—that the virus would have traveled from China over the course of weeks—we could have screened or stopped European travel much earlier and saved thousands of lives.
The ban was fatally flawed—announced by the president only two days before it was to go into effect. This late notice drove thousands of Europeans and Americans in Europe, many already sick with the virus, to rush to the airports to find seats before they would be locked out, causing crowding in airports in both Europe and New York. Customs and Border Protection checks at New York airports also shuffled thousands of travelers into tight waiting areas, further spreading the virus.
To be clear, New York’s problem was caused by federal negligence. New York was ambushed by COVID. I believe that this was on par with the greatest failure to detect an enemy attack since Pearl Harbor. The Japanese fleet sailed for twelve days and got to within two hundred miles of Pearl Harbor without being discovered. The U.S. Pacific Fleet was all gathered in a dense configuration totally unaware. COVID attacked from Europe, landing at the crowded JFK and Newark airports, infecting the dense Northeast. The historical echoes continue. The morning of Pearl Harbor the Americans had detected and captured a Japanese submarine just off the coast. Despite the submarine capture, the U.S. commander, Husband Kimmel, did not react quickly to the imminent threat. Likewise, the federal government knew in December 2019 that COVID was in China but did not react and did not realize that the virus had traveled to Europe and then took flight for America. By the time the European travel ban was put in place, the virus had been coming to New York for more than a month. After Pearl Harbor, FDR marshaled and mobilized Americans for the war effort; we would now need New Yorkers to mobilize to take on this challenge. The failure to detect the enemy in Pearl Harbor cost 2,400 lives. The failure to detect COVID in the northeast United States would cost ten times as many lives.
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THEY SAY PRESIDENT Trump is a voracious consumer of television news. From my interactions with him, they are right. He knew what I had said on television news shows better than I did; that became the medium for engagement. The only thing he responded to was public pressure, so that’s what I would use. I’d been pushing for federal assistance, including for two items on the top of my agenda: increasing testing capacity and the creation of additional hospital beds. We were also asking for ventilators. A substantial percentage of COVID patients required ventilators, and just providing a bed and staff would be useless without them. But there was another immediate challenge to address: the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) such as masks, gowns, and face shields. The increasing volume of patients at hospitals and the new testing facilities were consuming large quantities of PPE.
