American Crisis

later Oregon and so forth and so on. Because we were at our peak, I was asking other states to send us equipment and help. I told them that we would reciprocate and send staff and equipment when they hit their peak. If the federal government were to institutionalize this approach, it would allow one state to receive assistance from the other states when it was in dire need and likewise contribute assistance when its peak passed. It was the extension of the policy we were implementing within our state at the time. The statewide system moved the resources across the state as the need presented. A competent federal government should do the same for the nation, and I knew that the states would have been receptive and cooperative. Of course the idea went nowhere. Prophetically, months later, when our peak had passed and our infection rate was very low, we did just that. We were available to help other cities and states who were just hitting their peak, and we did.

Imagine how much better America’s situation would have been if the federal government had just organized states to do mutual aid. How many lives could we have saved?

—

ON MY VISITS to Manhattan, the empty streets were striking. I had never seen anything like that before. I didn’t want people to give up on New York City. They needed hope for the future. We announced a working group that would start preparing for New York’s reopening, identifying ways to immediately jump-start the economy. We could institutionalize lessons learned through the crisis and build back better. Every storm has a silver lining, and when you must rebuild, it would be foolish to just replace. We should take the opportunity to enhance and progress. If your home is destroyed, you don’t replace the kitchen with the same kitchen; you replace it with a better kitchen. We closed the economy; when we reopen the economy, it will be better than before. I had worked on rebuilding after many disasters in the federal government, and the message “Build Back Better” brought the impacted community hope. It was also totally true.

The president was becoming increasingly aggressive in his push to reopen the economy, and he was casting cautious governors as the problem. Once again Trump was blind to the actual consequences of his pronouncement about reopening by Easter. If governors followed Trump’s advice, they would be walking into a trap. Accelerated reopenings would not in fact help the economy but rather hurt it by increasing the viral transmission spike. Other countries that had been reopening had been seeing dramatic spikes in their infection rate that resulted in hot spots popping up. Reopening wasn’t that simple.

I was just as eager to reopen as Trump was, but the real question was not whether we reopen or not; the smart question was how. We announced a committee that would begin working on it full-time. My two former top aides, Steven Cohen and Bill Mulrow, both of whom served as secretary to the governor, would take charge. I’d worked with them for years and they were great. While I was focused on the immediate COVID issues, they would liaise with the business community to discuss the aftermath, whenever that would be!

It was truly a family affair. My brothers-in-law also pitched in on the effort: Brian O’Donoghue worked with Bill and Steve day and night to assist in the NY Forward initiative while Kenneth Cole worked with his designer contacts to track down PPE while launching the “How Are You, Really?” campaign to destigmatize mental health challenges. Howard Maier had a great background in advertising and would tell me how my communication efforts were being received. My cousin Matthew Cuomo, a highly talented attorney, moved into the mansion for the month of March to help stand up hospitals.

At this moment, the number of cases was still going up, so we were very much focused on reducing the spread and protecting vulnerable people. But we would run two operations in parallel. One would be dealing with the crisis of today—testing, hospital capacity, PPE, and ventilators—while one would be preparing for the reopening tomorrow.

MARCH 27 | 7,379 NEW CASES | 6,481 HOSPITALIZED | 134 DEATHS

  “This is a moment that is going to change this nation.”

THE JAVITS CENTER HAD BEEN transformed into a field hospital in just a week, and it gave me hope that we would be saving lives. Normally home to everything from the New York Boat Show to Comic Con to the New York International Auto Show, the center was now a twenty-five-hundred-bed hospital with medical staff coming from the military, the National Guard, and Northwell Health. We were still weeks away from the predicted apex of the curve. Estimates said it could take several weeks to reach the maximum hospital need, but we had to be ready.

Hopefully, we still had a chance to reduce the viral transmission rate so that we would not hit the maximum hospital need. However, we had to be ready for the worst-case scenario, which was that we would overwhelm the hospitals and need the emergency beds. Javits would be one of those emergency facilities that I hoped to God we would never need.

At Javits, we wanted to avoid the “hurricane shelter” imagery that was ingrained in so many of our minds when we saw the images of the Superdome in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina: rows and rows of cots as a shelter of last resort with conditions deteriorating by the day. It was critical that the Javits Center and other facilities be as close to real hospitals as we could get them, both to deliver the quality of care expected in a state with a globally renowned health-care system and to alleviate the trepidation and fear patients or their families would naturally feel when being told they were being transferred to a “field hospital.” Conveniently, the Javits had hundreds of exhibit-booth room dividers that could be