There were only so many balls I could juggle, and my team was on the verge of collapse from exhaustion; they often worked fourteen-hour days under normal circumstances, and the past months had been anything but normal. Larry Schwartz was a former top aide to me. I called Larry and asked him to come back and help. I hated doing it because I knew that if I asked, he couldn’t say no; he was that good a friend. I’d known him for thirty years. I told him that he could stay with me in the mansion and that we would “hang out” and have fun. Larry laughed: He knew hanging out was not in the cards for either of us.
Larry came to Albany and met my dog, Captain. Before COVID, it was just me and Captain. There were people at the mansion whom Captain interacted with. Captain loves Carol Radke, who has worked at the mansion since before my father was governor. The entire crew at the mansion had to adjust to a full house during COVID and took extra special care of my girls. Carol takes good care of me but better care of Captain. Captain and I were the pack members. I was the boss, and he was not the boss. That was the social order. It was simple. Captain is a Northern Inuit, and the order of the pack is important to him.
Then the three girls arrived and were in the house all the time: meals, mornings, nights. Captain’s world changed. This disrupted his perception of the pack and his place in the pack.
Now Larry was added to the pack. And Larry was another male. Larry appeared afraid of Captain, and Captain adopted a somewhat hostile posture toward Larry. Larry worked late and would not return to the mansion, from the capitol, until midnight or 1:00 A.M. By that time, I was usually upstairs. The conundrum was that Captain was still downstairs, and Larry and Captain had a number of encounters. I would set up blockades to allow Larry free passage without encountering Captain, but never with much success. Captain weighs about a hundred pounds and is quite resourceful. I could hear the commotion from my bedroom.
Altercations with Larry aside, Captain’s personality changed dramatically with the girls at home. Before the girls came, Captain was a “dog’s dog.” He was energetic and loved to be outside. He would chase squirrels and rabbits, although never catching them. He would bark when strangers came to the house. He had a cool detachment about him. There’s an Italian Renaissance concept called sprezzatura: a grace and aloofness that is most appealing. He exuded strength and confidence in his very presence.
But then the girls smothered Captain with kisses, hugs, sweetness, and constant cooing. Captain has become a tender, loving couch potato. Michaela is the main cause of Captain’s personality transformation. She has a hypnotic charisma. Now Captain doesn’t want to go outside, and he won’t give a squirrel a second look. All he does is walk over to the girls and put his head on their laps so they can whisper sweet nothings in his ear.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the kinder, sweeter, gentler Captain. But I tell the girls they broke him. They say, no, they fixed him.
Meanwhile, Larry coming back to Albany was a significant asset. He took over the contact tracing portfolio, working with Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, and his Bloomberg Philanthropies along with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, to establish a unified system in New York. We developed a contact tracing system for every county to use, and a training program for the thousands of new contact tracers. We established a benchmark minimum number of contact tracers every region of the state would need. We established a formula requiring 30 per 100,000 residents, but the formula allowed adjustment to the required number of tracers if the infection rate changed.
With Mayor Bloomberg’s help, over the next weeks New York developed the most sophisticated tracing program in the country, and we were soon in a position to offer the training online to any state that needed it. The tracing program is run by the state but operated by local governments. Statewide we have about fifteen thousand tracers working as of August 2020. It has allowed us to reduce the infection rate, identify originators of the virus, and attack hot spots before they become dangerous.
Every morning, either at the mansion or in my office in the state capitol, I would go over charts with new positive cases, analyzed by region, per county, and sometimes per zip code. Having this data was invaluable. It informed our reopening strategy. One day in mid-June, our zip code data would show an uptick in central New York, specifically Oswego and Cayuga Counties. The Oswego County Health Department had traced three new positive COVID-19 cases to an apple-packaging plant in the county. Over the next days, the New York State Department of Health and the local health department sent staff to test all employees and close the plant to conduct a deep clean. The team set up a free testing site at an apartment complex where a number of the employees and their families lived. The effort was successful; an initial three cases led to eighty-two total positive cases tied to the cluster, and the local and state health departments’ quick action ensured the cluster didn’t grow or spread into the broader community.
APRIL 24 | 8,130 NEW CASES | 14,258 HOSPITALIZED | 422 DEATHS
“An outbreak anywhere is an outbreak everywhere.”
(A. J. PARKINSON)
PEOPLE WERE WATCHING THE BRIEFINGS not only across the country but across the world. I was deluged with phone calls, emails, texts, and letters from every state in the nation and countries I have never even visited. It
