Posted on 03/25/2020 8:19:42 AM PDT by shortstop
It turns out Cuomo was wrong.
If his numbers yesterday are correct, if the graph of New York coronavirus cases and deaths has juked unexpectedly upward, then he was wrong.
Tragically, fatally wrong.
And New York City and the nation will probably suffer unimaginably as a result.
If the numbers are correct, and if social distancing and the flatten-the-curve approach are correct, then Cuomo should have ordered his New York Pause some three weeks earlier. And he should have embraced – instead of killed – Mayor Bill de Blasio’s consideration of a complete shutdown of New York City.
But he didn’t. And as a result, America’s largest city has become a new ground zero, to such an extent that a presidential advisor has recommended all people leaving the city self-quarantine for 14 days, to reduce the likelihood of taking the disease with them across the face of the nation.The dramatic uptick in coronavirus numbers released Tuesday by Gov. Andrew Cuomo seems to indicate that early New York efforts to control the disease were almost worse than ineffective. The pattern of spread is not as bad as the projections of what would happen if nothing was done to fight the disease – they are worse.
Which means that the governor can hold a good press conference, but he’s not that good at protecting his state and its largest city.
That conclusion, of course, presumes that what we’re being told about the coronavirus is accurate, that our various projections of spread and theories of containment are right. Public health and political leaders have defined the coronavirus pandemic in America as a matter of keeping the number of critical patients below the number of available intensive-care hospital beds, and of achieving that – in the absence of a vaccine – by social distancing arrived at through a combination of personal actions and government-ordered social shutdowns.
It is a logical argument.
But the irony of coronavirus social restrictions is that we are being asked to trust politicians and public health officials who created this dilemma by failing to adequately prepare our medical system for the foreseeable eventuality of a respiratory epidemic.
We are being asked to accept the flatten-the-curve paradigm by the same medical and government people – and the same governor – whose paradigm of hospital preparation created the problem which is currently crippling our country, and which may fundamentally weaken our personal and national finances for years to come.
Cuomo in 2015 was advised he was 16,000 respirators short of what he would need in the event of an epidemic. He was told he had one-ninth of the number he needed. But instead of buying more, as he was advised, he chose to commission a panel to create a rubric for – in the event of having more patients than respirators – deciding who would be denied a respirator in the case of an emergency.
That means he decided that, in the event of an epidemic, eight-ninths of critically ill New Yorkers would have to die.
That’s the Matilda’s Law that matters.
And now, as the respirator chickens are coming home to roost, and New Yorkers are dying by the dozens daily, Cuomo’s plan is unraveling. Preparations were based on a worst-case scenario of 110,000 critically ill patients at the epidemic’s peak, and the governor now believes it will be 140,000. And instead of that peak arriving in 45 days, it will be here in 14 or 21. That makes the peak much higher and much sooner than the governor anticipated, and that change came about after the implementation of three weeks of steady gubernatorial control.
He’s got great confidence, and he gives nice psychological counseling, but it’s not working.
At the root is humanity’s consistent weakness at predicting the future. People can make nice arguments and show pretty charts and graphs, but nobody knows what tomorrow brings. And nobody knows beforehand if universally accepted theories are right.
That left Cuomo without a crystal ball, and relying completely upon the social distancing flatten-the-curve approach. And Tuesday showed that thus far that hasn’t worked.
At least not yet. If flatten-the-curve is right and it can be achieved by social distancing, then after another two or three weeks – when the effects of the New York Pause may have kicked in – things should be expected to improve. If all the hypotheticals line up, there should be a decline in the rate of growth of new cases and deaths – not that the peak has been reached, but that the pause has started to choke off the spread.
But, again, humans aren’t good at predicting the future.
None of this should be discouraging, or take anybody by surprise. Failure is often part of the process of success. Many wars have been won by generals who lost battles. The Union Army lost Bull Run, but won Appomattox. America lost at Pearl Harbor, but won at Nagasaki.
The fight against this pandemic is a journey of discovery, and failure can teach you as much as success.
Andrew Cuomo has lost the opening round of the fight against the coronavirus, but hopefully can learn from that to help him fare better in the rounds that still lie ahead of us.
Yes, that was the lady doctor yesterday. The sick sanctuary state will seed and destroy the health of the nation. Cuomo is a disaster.
dividing people is what Lefties do, to preserve their elective offices.
“I really don’t think this virus can be spread through HVAC systems. Measles can but it has an Ro of 12 or so.”
I hope you are right. I’ve seen opinions that go both ways. In any case, you can’t go to the grocery store without walking down hallways or entering elevators. Just trying to walk down the street without close contact is a chore in cities.
New York wasn’t ready for a pandemic. They preferred to spend money on other things.
Cuomo will engage in fearmongering and blaming anyone other than himself. Anything other than accepting responsibility for his own lack of preparedness.
Measles can do bizarre things. It can create effective aerosols from dried scrapings. Thankfully it is largely just an annoyance to get. Anthrax does really strange stuff. They literally had a janitor change a light bulb in a room that had not been used for Anthrax research in decades. He got it.
Someone smarter than I has asked how he makes a presidential run when he won’t be done with the virus mess in his state by convention time maybe even by general campaign time?
Don’t forget De Blasio resisted closing the NYC schools long after the rest of the country was shut down. All those kids- millions of them- can be carriers.
One reason to want them NOW, is so they don’t go to the next hotspot in the country...
NYC has nowhere near 1.6 million Chinese. Could travel to and from China have exacerbated this ? Of course, but that was closed off on 1/31. Now travel to and from Italy wasn’t closed off until 10 days ago. So traveling paisans could have brought it on just as well. Teachers returning from mid winter recess from overseas definitely did ans the death of a NYC principal demonstrated and the failure to close the schools and even notify the Board of Health of positive test results certainly helped as 120,000 high school kids take mass transit every day.
12% of positive tests are hospitalized and 3% of positive tests are in the ICU.
And we don't have genuine statistical evidence, yet, that the "cure" is working or having an impact.
We all hope and pray, but first, you need to use real numbers, and second you have to plan assuming what goes wrong when your optimistic assumptions don't work out.
Some FReeper on another thread was just swooning over him and how well he was handling the crisis.
Several FReepers told him to go visit DU.
In Florida the governor is extremely mad at his health department. A plane load from NY landed and when a reporter started to ask them if they would self quarantine they said NO.
NY is spreading this virus across the USA.
Cuomo has been doing well but finally he makes a huge political mistake - NY is a problem because NY is a sanctuary city.
And his defiance - that's who we are and that's what we do and will do. Why is this my problem.
In the mixed up words of slow joe biden, maybe in the big cities, the disease is the cure.
Another way for joe to express this jumbled word salad, "If it kills enough city dwellers, the disease will burn itself out".
Very true, but I'm not sure this is what joe's handler's wanted him to blurt out.
However if it's NY, LA, SF, CHI, SEA, where is the downside?
7-8 bad guys to one good guy on average, OK, since I don't live there, good luck to the few good guys.
That is not an accident.
He is portraying a "take charge" executive action kind of leader, and getting plenty of TV time while not running for any office.
He states that he has 10 times the infection rate than adjoining states of NJ, Conn, Pa.
Only three percent (%3) of those severely infected will need ventilators and hospitalization.
This demand for ventilators is admirable, however, without the personnel (nurses and pulmonary technicians) to supervise,
it is irrelevant to demand the need to increase the number of hospital beds.
He is running for Vice-President behind an Alzheimer candidate.
de Blasio was right about the total shutdown, but he was wrong delaying school closings even earlier.
Classic case of a stopped clock is right twice per day.
His press conference this morning he wants the rest of the country to give up their ventilators because HE NEEDS them more!!!
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