It never made sense to me that New York’s own health-care system didn’t have a better supply. The hospital administrators said that they didn’t like to stockpile equipment or inventory as a general rule. I understood their point, but we now realized we needed a buffer. At my direction, the New York State Department of Health issued an order requiring all hospitals to have a ninety-day supply of PPE and nursing homes to have a sixty-day supply that they could access. We would not go through this again.
Necessity can also be the mother of invention, as the saying goes. Educators had been discussing remote learning for a long time. The technology has been available, but the bureaucracy has been slow to move and the status quo is protected. Higher education has made more progress on remote learning. A professor of international distinction can teach a course in the United Kingdom that can be broadcast to students around the world. Why couldn’t we have that for New York’s nearly three million K–12 students? I understand the advantage of the in-class experience, but it doesn’t have to be one or the other. There is a benefit of having access to other opportunities offered by technology. Think of students at rural or disadvantaged high schools that might not be able to offer AP courses; remote learning would give those students access to more course offerings, which would improve their chances at the college level and improve their work opportunities later in life.
COVID forced an abrupt and imperfect transformation to remote learning. Wealthier school districts had more success in the conversion, while school districts with lower-income families had more difficulty. Remote learning requires internet access and computers at home, which people in public housing or rural areas might not have. We worked to put the infrastructure in place, including remote wireless hubs in certain communities.
I spoke to Bill Gates, who had been working in this area, about the opportunity presented by the COVID disruption. Gates agreed to work with New York through his foundation to help us develop a blueprint to “reimagine education” in the new normal.
Beyond the immediate crisis, I wanted to know how you could take the blueprint devised in these days of crisis and make it permanent and actually strengthen the system going forward so, like the subway system, we don’t just fall back to the old ways post-COVID. The future is still a question mark for now; we have issued guidance for school districts to follow if and when they reopen, because we have rural and urban communities with very different needs and populations.
MAY 10 | 2,273 NEW CASES | 7,262 HOSPITALIZED | 207 DEATHS
“I wish I could be with you, but I can’t be because I love you.”
MOTHER’S DAY DURING COVID WAS a particularly lonely time for families. Afraid to hug or even be in the same space as a loved one who was elderly or in a vulnerable population meant over two months of unnatural solitude. We were saying “I love you” to one another by staying away, but the long, lonely days of isolation caused depression and angst.
The most painful aspect of the COVID crisis has been its devastating effect on our elderly in nursing homes. The first COVID case in the United States that really caught people’s attention was the nursing home near Seattle, Washington. Ever since, nursing homes across the nation have suffered tremendous hardship and loss; as of this writing, more than 41 percent of this nation’s COVID deaths have happened in nursing homes.
Understanding the threat, on March 13, we were taking every precaution that we could think of. Even before New York had a single COVID death, we banned visitors from going into nursing homes for fear that they might be transmitting the virus, and we required PPE, temperature checks, and cohorting of residents with COVID. Despite this, as was the case in every state in this nation, New York’s nursing homes were not spared from COVID’s wrath.
By early spring, Republicans needed an offense to distract from the narrative of their botched federal response—and they needed it badly. So they decided to attack Democratic governors and blame them for nursing home deaths. On April 25, conservative columnist Michael Goodwin published a piece in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post aimed at New York with the headline: “State Lacked Common Sense in Nursing Homes Coronavirus Approach.” It was an orchestrated strategy and a Fox News drumbeat. It wasn’t just me—Phil Murphy in New Jersey, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Gavin Newsom in California, and Tom Wolf in Pennsylvania were all in the Republican crosshairs on nursing homes. As the states with the most deaths were Democratic states, the Trump forces saw us as an easy target. Moreover, their entire COVID strategy was political: This was a Democratic state problem mishandled by Democratic governors.
The entire episode was truly despicable. Imagine having lost a loved one in a nursing home. You are already questioning yourself about whether you should have removed them and then you hear their life was lost because of a government blunder. I have talked to many people who have lost loved ones in nursing homes, and I could see the agony on their faces and hear it in their voices. It’s not so much that they were looking to blame anyone, they just needed to know what happened.
Unfortunately, although I tried, I never successfully communicated the facts on this situation. The Trump forces had a simple line: “Thousands died in nursing homes.” It was
