By March 14, London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, had seen enough. For weeks, she and her health officials had looked at data showing the evolving threat of COVID-19. In response, she’d issued a series of orders limiting the size of public gatherings, each one feeling more arbitrary than the last. She’d been persuaded that her city’s considerable and highly regarded health care system might be insufficient for the looming onslaught of infection and death.
Breed, it turns out, had sent de Blasio a copy of her detailed shelter-in-place order. She thought New York might benefit from it. Health officials well understood the grim mathematics. One New York City official said of those critical days in March: “We had been pretty clear with the state about the implications of every day, every hour, every minute.”
But the timing of New York’s shutdown undeniably played a role in the dire human toll the virus has exacted. In April, two prominent experts said in athat their research showed that had New York imposed its extreme social distancing measures a week or two earlier, the death toll might have been cut by half or more.
In recent days, Cuomo has said he wished he had been quicker to see the threat, “blow the bugle” and take action, only to all but instantly shift tone and cast blame everywhere: at international and U.S. health agencies; at the federal government; at news organizations.In an interview, a senior Cuomo administration official, authorized to speak but not be named, defended the timeliness of New York’s response to the virus.
But a range of health officials and scientists interviewed by ProPublica say creating such timelines misses the central issue: No later than Feb. 28, federal officials warned the country that a deadly pandemic was inevitable. It is from that point forward, they say, that any individual state’s actions should be judged.
Asked about the city’s claims, a Cuomo administration official insisted the state was working “hand in glove” with all local health departments. “Everyone underestimated the threat because the information we had was greatly limited from the start,” Goldstein said. As for expanding hospital capacity, it was not until March 16 that Cuomo designated a task force to engineer greater numbers of beds, demanding a 50% increase in capacity in 24 hours.
“I can’t recall in the last 15 years a discussion with the state about what would need to be done in a pandemic,” Dowling said in an interview.
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