“Caitlin? What’s wrong with Caitlin?” I asked.
“Well, really it’s the whole press office, but primarily it’s Caitlin,” Melissa continued. I could hear the panic in her voice. “She wasn’t feeling well yesterday afternoon, so Peter [Peter Ajemian, our loyal and reliable deputy communications director] sent her home. I thought he was being dramatic, but agreed it was better to be safe than sorry.”
I cut her off. “And what information do we have now that we didn’t have yesterday afternoon?”
“Last night, she had a fever. So Dr. Zucker thought it was best that she take a coronavirus test; the test came back positive around 11:00 last night, but to be absolutely sure Dr. Zucker had them do a second test.”
“Okay, and?”
“And it was negative. So there we are. And yes, we are having her tested a third time to find out exactly what is going on. We don’t know at this moment definitively if she is sick or not. That being said, for the last several days she has been sitting in the press office, which, as you know, could generously be described as a sardine can, with nine other staffers,” she continued at a frenetic pace.
“The belief is that if she got sick, it happened over the weekend when she was in New York City. I’ve carefully retraced your movements and my movements for the past four days, and the reality is that neither of us has been near her, but I’ve spoken with Dr. Zucker, and he thinks, again, out of an abundance of caution—just out of an abundance of caution—we have to quarantine every single person in the press office and a handful of the advance staff who she came into contact with. So there it is—you know everything I know.”
“Okay, deep breath. I’ll be in the office in fifteen minutes.”
By the time I arrived in the office a few minutes later, it was clear the staff had been up all night. Linda Lacewell, one of my longest-serving aides based in New York City who had recently been parked on the second floor of the capitol to help manage the crisis, had already put a wave of new protocols into motion. Linda is a former federal prosecutor who worked with me in the attorney general’s office. As a lawyer, she has a rare combination of talents: facility with the law and with managing people. After the attorney general’s office, she had left to take a great gig in her home state of California. A few months after her departure I called her up and said, “You have to come back, I really need you.” She came. If you understood the bond that we develop working together the way we do, you wouldn’t be surprised. I work with a group of people who would do anything for one another, and they do.
—
LINDA HAD CREATED a list of staff people deemed “essential,” who were permitted to work from inside the capitol, and another much more modest list of staff labeled “essential essential,” who were allowed to enter the contained suite of offices connecting my office, Melissa’s office, the conference room, and the Red Room. A crew of maintenance staff would arrive by 7:00 A.M. to clean surfaces.
That morning represented a critical juncture in other ways as well. It was about communicating to 19.5 million people that the virus had reached a point of spread that required dramatic action; I was asking New Yorkers to stay home. And I was, by extension, telling millions of them that they were about to lose their jobs. Today wasn’t about me or my staff’s behind-the-scenes drama. Today was about delivering truly tough news to New Yorkers and hoping they would follow it. We would see if the public really trusted me and were ready to sacrifice.
The sudden increase in cases was jarring, and the progression of the incremental actions had reached a climax. It was time to announce New York State on PAUSE (the acronym stood for Policies Assure Uniform Safety for Everyone), which banned all nonessential gatherings, established social distancing requirements, and closed 100 percent of nonessential businesses. We had already started the process gradually, so people could get used to the idea.
Closing down society is easier said than done, and many politicians didn’t appreciate the complexity of the issue. First, you can’t close down until you have all the precautions in place and have thought through all the ramifications. Closing down is not a press release; it’s the most complex government policy we have ever instituted. Necessary functions must continue or you risk anarchy. Contact must be made with all the main system operators so they know what is coming and are prepared for it. If a closedown order is going to impact the workforce or management of an essential system, you’d better know in advance.
Second, the public must comply, and that means they have to be socialized prior to the announcement through a gradual process that communicates the increasingly dire nature of the situation. Communicating the seriousness haphazardly causes panic, but communicating it incompletely causes people to refuse to follow the order. Again, New York’s closedown accomplished these prerequisites within only nineteen days. And it had never been done before.
After we made the announcement on Friday the twentieth, we had two days to decide what exactly was “essential” versus “nonessential” before the order went into effect on Sunday. In government, we use these terms during events like snowstorms, when travel is perilous. You don’t want people on the roads, but the government needs to operate, so who are the most essential people to allow the government to do its work? Everyone else stays home.
But now we were dealing with the entire private sector. I sat at my conference room table with Melissa as well as Robert Mujica, the state budget director, and other members of my team to go through a list of industries, one sector at a time, deciding
