You hear about the isolation of leadership. Now I understood it. In the heat of battle, one must make decisions seeing the full field and the entire context. Many observers and pundits bring only a particular perspective and therefore find it easy to criticize, but I tried to hold every scenario and every concern in my head at every moment. We needed to slow the virus spread. There was no way our hospital system could manage the volume every model had projected. The nightmare of people dying in hospital corridors we were seeing in Italy loomed. We would have to move heaven and earth to create more hospital beds faster than any state in the nation, but it still would not be enough. Therefore, we needed to reduce the viral spread more than any of the experts thought was possible.
The “closedown” strategies, theoretically, could do just that: reduce activity and reduce the spread. But it wasn’t that simple. Pundits will say in hindsight that we should have closed earlier. But they are missing an important point. Government can announce drastic and dramatic policies to close down and reduce activity. The intelligent question was, would people follow them? It is naïve to think that government could order the most dramatic behavior change in modern history and assume all people would salute and follow the order. This is not China. This government has no ability to enforce closedown rules on 19.5 million people. State government has only about six thousand troopers, and local governments’ ability or desire to use their police to enforce unpopular directives is uneven at best. As we would learn, government couldn’t even keep young people from gathering at bars! Compliance would be essentially voluntary. Mask wearing, social distancing, and stay-at-home orders would have to be socially accepted. The public would need to agree that the policies were necessary, which means they had to be educated to that realization.
Further compounding the challenge was that we had to inform them of the drastic consequences without panicking them. The calibration needed to be exquisitely balanced. Panic and chaos would be harder to manage than COVID. The information had to be communicated in a measured way, but quickly. Also, “government” writ large was offering mixed messages. The federal government was saying that COVID was not a major threat, so why would the public accept drastic action? One message from me and a different message from Trump could create a political divide. I had to first earn the trust of the public and gain unprecedented credibility to overcome the intense politics and mixed messages of the time. I studied other governments’ actions. California had fifty days to socialize the notion of a shutdown to the public after its first case. That was a long time. I didn’t have that luxury. I would need to move faster.
Communicating facts and authenticity, and taking daily incremental closedown actions correlated to the new information on the increasing threat: every day more cases announced, every day ratcheting a closedown. I closed down 50 percent of nonessential workers, then 75 percent. On March 20, only nineteen days from our first case, we announced a 100 percent closedown. People virtually unanimously supported it, and compliance was nearly universal. It was truly incredible.
In retrospect, I wonder if I could have accomplished achieving credibility with the public and getting them to understand the need to close down even faster than nineteen days. The truth is, I will never know. The stakes couldn’t have been higher. The risk was that if I announced closedown orders before the public was ready to support them and they rejected them, all would be lost—we would be worse off. Once the public lost trust in me or disregarded my proposals, the entire effort would be derailed. I believe I moved as quickly as I believed and felt I could, given the balance I needed to maintain, but it is impossible to know.
The risk of losing the public cannot be underestimated. In the end, we did what many thought was impossible, faster than any government had done it at the time, and faster and more effectively than any of the experts thought we could. Amen.
MARCH 20 | 2,950 NEW CASES | 1,042 HOSPITALIZED | 8 DEATHS
“When we look back at this situation ten years from now, I want to be able to say to the people of New York, I did everything we could do.”
COVID LITERALLY AND FIGURATIVELY CHANGED the entire atmosphere of social interaction. You couldn’t shake hands and were afraid to touch another human being. Our team couldn’t sit in meetings together or share a meal. We conducted meeting after meeting on Zoom, but it’s not the same as a human interchange. People had to think before they touched the doorknob. No one knew when and where the enemy would strike again. While we were being careful in my operation, my first priority was to get the job done, and I couldn’t do that in a hermetically sealed bubble. Nor did I want to. It was important for me to try to project a sense of normalcy, even though that was far from what we were experiencing. My staff and the press who covered us were already nervous after two members of the New York State Assembly had tested positive the weekend before.
That Friday at 5:15 A.M., my phone rang. It was Melissa.
“We have a situation, but I want to start off by saying that I’m calm and everyone is calm, and it’s all going to be fine,” she said, the tone of her voice suggesting that the person she was trying to reassure was herself.
“It’s Caitlin,” she said. Caitlin Girouard, our press secretary, was primarily based out of New York City but had spent the
