ROGER KIMBALL: Andrew Cuomo’s COVID Carnage.
We have a veritable litany of failure, much of it deadly. Cuomo began by downplaying the seriousness of the virus and boasting that New York, being ‘fully coordinated’ and ‘fully mobilized’, was going to handle it much better than many places. That was on March 2. Fast forward two months and New York leads the country in coronavirus deaths, accounting for a third or more of the nationwide total. At some point the governor began to panic, shouting that New York would need 140,000 beds (it needed 18,500 at the peak) and 30,000 ventilators. Soon I expect to see them littering antique stores repurposed as planters.
What made Cuomo’s handling of the situation so bad? Critics point to a host of policies. Waiting until just a couple of weeks ago to pay serious attention to cleaning the subway system was one failure. But the real doozy was forcing nursing homes to take patients infected with the virus. What part of the population is by far the most vulnerable to the virus? The elderly. Who occupies nursing homes? The elderly. Cuomo might as well have sent in a SWAT squad and ordered it to start firing. Not only did he require nursing homes to take infected patients, he made it against the law even to ask if new patients were infected. Thousands died.
Sunday, Cuomo finally admitted, sort of, his mistake, but the damage had been done.
What about the second question? How is it that Cuomo has not only survived but thrived politically? Is he getting help from China? I ask because not only has he praised China’s brutal handling of the disease, he has also taken to referring to it as a ‘European virus‘.
Memo to the governor: Wuhan is not in Europe.
It’s easy to tell who’s on the payroll, or at least on the team.
Plus: “The wretched Atlantic magazine recently described Georgia’s decision to start reopening the state as an experiment in ‘human sacrifice’. That is the current meme of the left. ‘Reopening the country is dangerous!’, they say. But in fact, all the states that have begun to reopen have so far fared better than New York, which really is the epicenter of the disease.”