“While he done nothing....”
An article form the NY Times, no less...
The last time that Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio made a joint appearance to address their constituents: March 2, the day after the first New Yorker tested positive for COVID-19. “Out of an abundance of caution we will be contacting the people who were on the flight with her from Iran to New York,” Cuomo vowed. However: “No one ever did that work,” the Times found. And the flight was from, Iran, not China.
On Feb. 2, de Blasio stated at a coronavirus press conference that, “What is clear is the only way you get it is with substantial contact with someone who already has it. You don’t get it from a surface. You don’t get it from glancing or very temporary contact based on what we know now.” New York Health Commissioner Dr. Oxiris Barbot added: “This is not a time to fall prey to false information that you may be seeing on the internet, to fall prey to the stigma.… This is not something that you’re going to contract in the subway or on the bus.”
New York City was far behind the national and international curve in closing down public schools to stop the community spread of COVID-19. The reason had little to do with science—indeed, Demetre Daskalakis, the city’s head of disease control, reportedly threatened to quit if the schools were not shuttered, as did several other city health officials.
But de Blasio sees schools as delivery systems of government services to the poor, and as the Times delicately (and over-generously) phrased it, the mayor’s “progressive political identity has been defined by his attention to the city’s have-nots.” So even as three dozen city virologists were warning that keeping the schools open amounted to “gambling with the lives of New Yorkers,” de Blasio was exempting the institutions from his order to stop all city gatherings of 500 or more people, explaining with perhaps more literalism than he intended that the schools were one of “three things we want to preserve at all cost.”
Preventing the dissemination of bad information is a classic managerial mistake, one particularly endemic in poorly run governments. So, too, is a stubborn unwillingness to learn. Perhaps most distressing in the Times article is not the particulars of policy errors, but an expressed unconcern at acknowledging them: “The governor and the mayor emphasized that they had no misgivings about their initial handling of their response.”
And as they say, the rest is history.
rwood
Thanks for posting that.