The goal should be not just holding people responsible for the mistakes that were made, but also learning from them. Understanding what went wrong in those early months – and bolstering the state’s defenses against future pandemics – ought to be a top priority in Albany. As led by Governor Cuomo for the past decade, the state’s public health infrastructure proved to be underprepared, ill-equipped and fatefully slow to act in a burgeoning crisis. When the system stumbles, as it did in 2020, the consequences can be catastrophic. When it works well, the public health system quietly saves lives on a large scale by preventing diseases from spreading instead of treating people after they get sick.
It consists largely of scientists in government agencies rather than clinicians in hospitals. In February 2020, the state’s first line of defense against the virus should have been its public health system – the branch of health care focused on caring for large populations rather than treating individual patients. The challenge for leaders today is to properly benefit from that hard-won hindsight. With the benefit of hindsight is it clear that waiting was a massive mistake. Had officials taken stronger preventive measures back then, they might have contained the outbreak before it spiraled out of control, killed more than 53,000 New Yorkers, threw millions out of work and disrupted normal life for more than a year.īased on the limited information available to them at the time, the state’s leaders misjudged the scale of what New York faced. The state missed its best chance to save lives not in March or April, when infections soared and hospitals filled up, but in early February, when the virus arrived and started spreading before anyone noticed. One lesson deserves more attention from Albany: The public health system matters. Better-controlled outbreaks in countries such as South Korea demonstrate the value of public health preparedness and could serve as a model for New York.Īs New York emerges from the worst pandemic in a century, its citizens face a new threat to their lives and economic well-being – the danger that their leaders will fail to learn from a painful experience.To date, none of the Legislature’s pandemic-related hearings has focused on the critical missteps of the state’s early response.The state’s early response was undermined by flawed guidance from the federal government, inadequate planning and stockpiling, limited consultation with experts, exaggerated projections and poor cooperation between federal, state and local officials, among other issues.In the three weeks between New York’s first positive test and the governor’s lockdown order, the statewide caseload mushroomed from an estimated 40,000 to 1 million – which was likely the peak of the first wave of infections.When the state’s first COVID-19 case was formally confirmed on March 1, officials underestimated how far it had already spread and reacted slowly and ineffectively – delays that would contribute to the high death toll.Officials failed to heed warning signs, such as an early March spike in flu-like illness in New York City emergency rooms.Although outbreaks in China and Europe had signaled the danger to come, New York officials initially discouraged the public from taking precautions.The state’s outbreak likely began in early February but spread undetected for weeks because of problems with CDC-produced test kits.In the decade leading into 2020, state lawmakers reduced funding and staff for public health while putting more resources into Medicaid.In terms of speed and deadliness, New York’s novel coronavirus pandemic ranks among the worst in the world.