By mid-June, New York’s problem had become that visitors from other states were bringing the virus here. It was déjà vu all over again. Federal incompetence allowed the virus to arrive in New York from Europe in the first place, making New York a global hot spot. New York, on its own, designed and implemented a strategy to flatten the curve and reduce the transmission rate, and now here we are again with the virus coming in across our borders.
In late June, I joined with Governor Murphy of New Jersey and Governor Lamont of Connecticut to announce a fourteen-day quarantine for people coming from states with a high infection rate. The number of states on the list would grow to more than half the country, then more than two-thirds. If I had not lived the situation every day, I would not have believed what has happened. The new threat is that New Yorkers, who worked so hard to contain the spread and bend the curve, could now be infected by people coming from other states with soaring infection rates. Hadn’t they seen what we went through? The refrigerated trucks to store the dead? Now those trucks are in Houston. Where else will they be needed? What does it take for people to open their eyes?
It was all so unnecessary. We all worked so hard to save lives.
We had the facts. There was nothing to debate. There were two theories that we tested in the laboratory of reality. The results were undeniable. Trump’s theory was to deny the existence of the virus and, when that didn’t work, act as if it were irrelevant and reopen the economy immediately. Our theory was that a virus requires a science-based solution and that a phased, data-driven reopening was smarter and better in the long term.
Both theories have been put to the test. States like Arizona, Florida, and Texas that followed Trump’s demands to reopen quickly saw increased infection rates and needed to close their economies back down—reopening only to re-close. As a result, the financial markets were distressed with the volatility in these states. This stood in stark contrast to New York, where as of this writing 75 percent of our economy is open and our infection rate has been consistently 1 percent or below for nearly three months and among the lowest in the nation.
It is incomprehensible that people still support Trump’s disproven theories. The states that most closely followed Trump’s “guidance” were doing the worst. In Florida, Governor DeSantis was seeing an explosion of cases, and his hospital system was overwhelmed just two months after he demanded his apology. More than forty states were seeing the virus increase, and the federal health officials—Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, and the CDC director, Robert Redfield—warned that the situation would get worse. Trump wouldn’t wear a mask or suggest the public should until mid-July.
There are important lessons to learn. When one looks back at how COVID arrived in the United States, it is a frightening and almost inconceivable series of failures and incompetence. It was a spectacular government catastrophe on one of its most vital activities: maintaining national security and public health. In retrospect, the failings are clear.
Where was this country’s public health system charged with monitoring possible global diseases?
The federal Centers for Disease Control has the mission “to protect America from health, safety and security threats, both foreign and in the U.S.” It failed.
The mission of the National Institutes of Health is to “seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.” It failed.
The Department of Homeland Security’s mission is “to safeguard the American people, our homeland, and our values with honor and integrity.” It failed.
Our federal government, on all levels, has still not answered the basic question: “How did this happen?” To divert attention and responsibility from himself and the White House, the president blamed the World Health Organization. He has also added the conspiratorial element that the WHO was “too close” to China and implied that they were reluctant to criticize China and therefore didn’t alert the nation to the coronavirus pandemic. The president often implies a conspiratorial element to fan Americans’ fear and isolationism.
In truth, the WHO, which was created by the United Nations and is partially funded by the United States (at least until Trump announced we were withdrawing in 2021), is charged with monitoring and mitigating worldwide diseases as they spread. The WHO might very well have been slow in realizing the way the virus spread. But to this day, we don’t know what information the WHO gave our federal government and when. We don’t have access to the federal communications with the WHO. We don’t know from where Peter Navarro received the information that caused him to write the now infamous January 30 memo saying that one to two million Americans could die. We do know that the WHO publicly declared a global health emergency on January 30, 2020. While late January was sooner than the United States took action, it was still not soon enough.
The federal government didn’t know the virus was in New York until it had been here for months. The consequences of that blunder cannot be underestimated. Rarely has a government failure had such immediate, significant, and quantifiable ramifications. You can count the consequences in number of lives lost and billions spent. You can count it in the number of unemployed Americans and bankruptcy claims. For New York State it was particularly devastating.
And now, the recent projection models show that due to the increased infection rate in the country, tens of thousands more Americans will die. As of this writing, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation model, the model the president
