The irony is that the states that followed Trump’s guidelines would also end up beating projections—in the opposite direction—and the administration would have to constantly revise their projections upward. The numbers were irrefutable. How could Americans continue down this road? How did we not see the cliff?
APRIL 30 | 4,681 NEW CASES | 11,598 HOSPITALIZED | 306 DEATHS
“Nobody ever said it was going to be easy. But nobody ever said it was going to be this hard, either.”
NEW YORK CITY POSED MANY unique complications for reopening. The density and crowding was an aggravating factor in the spread of the virus, and public transportation in New York makes it extraordinarily difficult to socially distance. But a significant challenge for us was figuring out how to keep people who use subways and buses safe. The initial information from the experts was that the virus could live on a surface for up to two days, depending on the surface. Stainless steel was supposed to be one of the surfaces that allowed the virus to be the most viable for the longest period of time, and the interiors of buses and subway cars are largely stainless steel.
Cleaning the New York City subway system has been one of the city’s great challenges for the past hundred years. The system is one of the largest on the globe and the only system that operates 24/7. Over the past thirty years the subway system had become a permanent facility for the homeless. I had worked on the issue of homelessness since my twenties, and I have been continually frustrated by society’s gross failure to handle this issue. Once again we see the typical formula for failure in our society: political paralysis and government incompetence. Oh, but you say, you are the governor, why didn’t you fix it? Good question. Sometimes even the governor can’t fix it.
In New York City, homelessness is handled by City Hall and the NYPD. The mayor’s refusal to remove the homeless from the subways was making the problem worse instead of better. The subways were filthy and filled with homeless people. This is the dynamic not just in New York City but in urban areas all across the country. Homeless encampments have become urban fixtures. Why a so-called homeless advocate would support keeping human beings in subhuman conditions has always been perplexing to me. Why politicians would accept this position as “progressive” is also beyond me. Nonetheless, the advocates support the right of the homeless to live in the subways, and the mayor refused to have the NYPD remove them. The MTA and New York City have spent tens of millions of dollars on grants for nonprofits to “outreach” to the homeless with virtually no success. Now enter the COVID crisis. This wasn’t doing the homeless any favors, letting them stay on trains in the middle of a global health pandemic with no masks. In addition, crime was rising even as ridership had dropped 90 percent.
The subway system needed to operate throughout the COVID crisis because essential workers needed it to get to work. Essential workers—police, firefighters, health-care workers—were still using the system to get to their essential jobs, without which society would have collapsed. We were committed to doing everything we could to keep them safe. I still had not gotten over the responsibility I felt for calling out the “essential workers.” They were risking their lives and some had died. I would do everything in my power to keep them safe. That was my obligation to them. That meant that the subways had to be disinfected every night, which is something that hadn’t been done since the system began. It was almost a laughable concept.
First, I had to figure out if cleaning at this scale was even possible. MTA officials told me it was impossible because the system runs twenty-four hours a day and there are six thousand subway cars and they are filled with the homeless. We’d have to disinfect the entire interior of every car—every rail, every pole, every door, wherever a hand could touch or a cough or sneeze could land, wherever droplets could land. We’d also have to disinfect the stations, the handrails, everything that people could be touching.
I personally spoke to a number of commercial cleaners about the application and safety of different chemicals. Some vendors suggested the use of ultraviolet light. Others proposed a new technology that could be sprayed on a surface to kill viruses for up to thirty days. While some of the technologies were experimental, I was convinced it could be done. To even try to accomplish this goal, we would need to do two things. First, stop the trains from running for several hours in the middle of the night to allow them to be cleaned. Second, homeless individuals and all their belongings would have to be out of every car and every station in the system.
This was going to be a monumental challenge. The homeless advocates would be outraged, city officials would balk, and the police and MTA workers would need to perform at a higher level than ever. But there was really no alternative because we couldn’t have people on the trains unless we knew they were safe. I moved forward, and the MTA and I identified the right cleaning contractors and chemicals. I told city officials I was doing this and if they wanted to oppose it, that would be their prerogative, but that I was confident the people of New York City would support me.
If we put out a plan and discussed it for weeks, it would get bogged down in political controversy. Once an issue becomes politically complicated in New York City, it slows, stalls, and then dies. Moreover, the essential
