American Crisis

by Andrew Cuomo

  Scientists were telling me that we might be approaching the apex of the curve, the point where it starts to flatten. But I didn’t even believe them anymore. It was all projections based on extrapolations and assumptions. How high up does the incline take us? Once we hit the apex, how long does it last? How fast is the decline on the other side? No one knew. For all the geniuses and experts, no one could tell me anything definitive.

  Every day in my briefing I listed the number of hospitalizations and deaths. Every day it went up. Every day there was a bar on a chart in the PowerPoint presentation that represented the daily toll. And every day the bar went up a little bit higher than the day before. When you connected the tops of the bars, that was the curve: a sloped line going up. I would stare at the chart every day, and I would see a climb up a mountain. Each day was another step up. No one knew how high the mountain was and how many steps it would take to reach the summit. In fact, we knew that the summit had not even been determined; it would be determined by the actions we took right now. We would reach the summit when we created the summit. We would create the summit with the closedown and social distancing. We were defining the mountain as we climbed it.

  I had to talk myself through it. Every mountain has a peak, right? Even Denali has a peak. Ours had to be somewhere. We just couldn’t give up. And when we reached the summit, we would plant the flag and start the descent. And the descent would be easier because the way down is always easier than the way up. We just had to make it to the top. Every day, even though it was a hard day, was one step closer. Maybe today is the day!

  We were still having trouble getting people to understand how important social distancing was. I didn’t blame them; it was a new concept, frightening and difficult. The problem was, by the time they realized its importance, it might be too late. I had tried to communicate it every way possible. I increased the fine for violations to $1,000. Local governments were supposed to be enforcing the rule but were lax. I had spoken to them about stepping up enforcement compliance, but it was very unpopular on the local level. Some local officials stepped up, but most didn’t. The lack of compliance was worse among young people. The crowds that had turned out to watch the USNS Comfort arrive in New York Harbor were a portrait in irony.

  There was nothing left for me to do but keep beating the drum, raise the fine, and hope that with cases going up, deaths going up, and hospitalizations going up, people would get the message.

  And then there was a new problem. The number of unemployed people in New York State was skyrocketing as shuttered businesses laid off or furloughed workers. The federal government passed a new unemployment law to be administered by the states, including “Pandemic Unemployment Assistance” for gig economy workers, the self-employed, and those specifically laid off as a result of the pandemic. The new benefits required individuals to fill out multiple applications, and necessitated that we obtain certain specific information from enrollees and then certify continued unemployment status for every applicant every week. The New York State Department of Labor administers unemployment insurance and had become totally swamped with the number of people requesting assistance. As of this writing, New York State has now paid over $38 billion in unemployment benefits to more than 3.3 million New Yorkers—compared to just $2.1 billion paid in all of 2019. That’s more than sixteen years’ worth of benefits paid in just over four months.

  The press was harping on the number of people who were understandably frustrated that they hadn’t yet gotten any unemployment aid. These are the same reporters who will be the first to criticize when it turns out the state rushed payments and that certain people received money who were not technically eligible.

  My team was doing everything they could. We brought in Google to launch a streamlined unemployment application and reboot the website. We brought in over three thousand additional people to handle the incoming requests, contracted with outside call centers, and reassigned personnel from other state agencies to help manage the influx. Pre-pandemic, it took two to three weeks to process payments—the deluge of incoming caused a backup, and the public was understandably panicked; so many New Yorkers live check to check, and people in New York City paid rents that could swallow more than half of a worker’s income before they could even think about food and utilities. There was very little patience and lots of anxiety.

  I told my team to strip out all the bureaucracy but not become lax on the mandated federal certifications. I have seen too many times when government “waste, fraud, and abuse” becomes an all-too-easy refrain when a mistake is made. My team worked very hard to accomplish both goals, and while nothing is ever perfect—especially in an emergency—as of this writing, we were successful in preventing over $1 billion in fraudulent unemployment claims, protecting taxpayer money and upholding the integrity of the system.

  APRIL 7 | 8,174 NEW CASES | 17,493 HOSPITALIZED | 731 DEATHS

  “This is not an act of God that we’re looking at; it’s an act of what society actually does.”

  SOME GOOD NEWS: THE NEW York State lab had developed its own test for antibodies. It was a new weapon in the arsenal. There were now two types of tests: diagnostic and antibody. Diagnostic tests detect whether a person is positive or negative at the time of the test. The antibody test tells you whether the person has had the virus in the past. Experts at this time said they believed that once a person was infected, they could not be reinfected. This was promising, if not entirely conclusive. It suggested that the presence of antibodies could identify workers who could immediately return to the workplace safely.

  The antibody test could also help determine how the virus was spreading and where. It could target the spread by demographics and geography. To me, data was the key. We were flying blind for so long, looking at vague projection models with so many caveats they were virtually meaningless. Maybe, just maybe, now we would have actual facts that we could study and that wouldn’t change. I was also worried about protections for our essential workers, and this test could now give us specific data as to the infection rates among different work groups.

  * * *

  —

  “EMOTIONALLY OVERWHELMING” IS A concept that I now fully appreciate. It is the culmination and bombardment of a number of intense and sometimes conflicting emotions. The fear and exhaustion were constant. The intensity was also a constant. But I also had a growing frustration at the “unforced” errors. We will make mistakes no matter how good we are at what we do. There will be unknowns and miscalculations. But unilateral, unnecessary, unforced errors are incredibly infuriating for me to accept.

  The COVID virus was starting to spread across the country. The federal government was still in full denial and minimization mode, but they had also persuaded a number of states to follow their political posture. This was an unforced error. Every health expert and scientist who researched COVID said the same thing: COVID will spread. This country made that horrendous blunder once already when the virus spread undetected from China to Europe to New York. We watched the spread across countries, and we saw the pain. I was watching it spread from New York City to Long Island and then upstate. We know it will spread within states and among states. We know that if some states allow it to spread, it will infect us all. It is a proven fact. Why is the nation making these unnecessary, damaging mistakes?

  APRIL 8 | 10,453 NEW CASES | 18,079 HOSPITALIZED | 779 DEATHS

  “Every number is a face.”

  THERE HAD BEEN A SERIES of national polls that had tested different officials’ credibility and popularity during the COVID crisis. The most credible and popular had always been Dr. Anthony Fauci. He communicated with sincerity, and he was not a politician. There was also the suggestion that he had been more loyal to science than to Trump. I spoke to Dr. Fauci regularly and he was a great support.

  Right below Fauci was me. This came as a huge surprise. I knew the briefings had attracted a large national audience, but it had
been a relatively short time—it only felt long! The briefings were generating a lot of social media. While everyone was locked in their homes, they spent a lot of time on their computers. One moment that lightened everybody’s mood was Randy Rainbow’s parody of the song “Sandy” from Grease, now renamed “Andy.” I don’t know if it was Randy who coined “Cuomosexual,” and to this day I’m not really sure what it means, but I think it’s a good thing.

  Trump was still not rated favorably at all. His popularity had been falling from past polls. People didn’t believe him and didn’t think he knew what he was talking about—a bad combination. It was remarkable that my polling was as high as it was, because I had been making a lot of difficult decisions and this had been my first exposure to a national audience on any significant scale. I am also a known Democrat from a northeastern state, which immediately brings a certain negative baggage. It still amazes and heartens me that people just wanted the truth, competence, and confidence from their leaders.

  I’d always admired Winston Churchill as a great leader, and he’s served as an inspiration throughout the crisis. He communicated with people and urged them to action. He also delivered. He made the mechanism of government produce, made it effective on the details. An army was assembled and fought a war.

  I never forgot this Churchill truism: Either you deliver or you don’t. While I spent a great deal of time working on my relationship with the people, I put as much energy into the management of government. It’s all about the details and achieving results, especially when it’s life or death, making the bureaucracy work. I understand why some state governments and the federal government ran from the challenge. It’s really hard.

  APRIL 13 | 6,337 NEW CASES | 18,825 HOSPITALIZED | 671 DEATHS

  “None of us has done this before.”

  WE BELIEVED WE HAD HIT the peak. Today was the highest number of deaths we had, but the number of occupied ICU beds and the number of new hospitalizations were down from the day before. The number of deaths couldn’t keep growing if fewer people were entering hospitals.

  Were we finally seeing a break? If so, the question would now become, how long would we be on the “plateau”? The plateau is where the number stabilizes but does not yet begin to drop. The follow-up question was, how steep is the drop? Meaning, how quickly would the number of new people entering the hospital system slow?

  Trump was fully focused on “reopening” the country, although he had to give up on his Easter plan, because that had come and gone. It was clear he believed his reelection would hinge solely on the economy. While the economy is normally a sound predictor of an incumbent’s reelection, it is not definitive. And what’s ironic is that a strong response to the COVID crisis could have all but guaranteed Trump’s reelection. If Trump had any ability to understand the responsibility of government and the responsibility of leadership, he would have seized the moment. If he had led the country through COVID, he could have been one of the greatest national leaders in a generation. Trump just had to recognize the reality and lead. He had to see the situation through the eyes of the public rather than through his own narcissistic lens. But then that is the difference between Trump and a great leader. Asking him not to act in his self-interest is like asking a skunk not to smell.

  * * *

  —

  I WAS READING books about war. I wanted a distraction and to read about a time that was worse than the time we were in. But I was also curious about how military leaders could make decisions that they knew would cost lives—situations where even if you won the battle, you knew there could be hundreds of thousands of casualties. All great military leaders manage to do it. General Dwight Eisenhower was told days prior to the D-Day invasion of Normandy that as many as three quarters of his troops might be killed. There was no battle or victory to be had without the loss of life. They celebrated the victory and mourned the dead. But how could they rationalize that their decisions cost soldiers their lives? Was every victory really that important? What calculus did they apply?

  I realized that my situation was so much easier than a military leader’s. I was doing everything I could to save every life possible, but still people would die and it would be on my watch. Maybe there was something else I could’ve done. Maybe there was a better drug to use. Maybe if more people would’ve worn a mask we could have avoided more infections. Maybe I should have had fewer essential workers report to work. The questions went on and on and on and on. During the day I was too busy to torture myself, but at night I would lie in bed and scroll through the reel of questions. I had discussed every decision before I made it with every expert I could find. There was no decision made in haste or without exhaustive conversation. But that didn’t mean every decision was right.

  As a general rule, I am very conscious of asking for constructive criticism. I even ask for destructive criticism. People don’t like to deliver bad news. They especially don’t like to deliver bad news to people in power. You have to ask for it and invite it and make sure they know that you won’t shoot the messenger. I compliment people who give me the harshest criticism. People don’t like to deliver criticism, because people don’t like to hear it themselves. We run from our weaknesses and try to deny them, even to ourselves. But if we don’t acknowledge them, there will be no improvement.

  There’s no doubt that the long-term relationship with my team provided grounding and a source of comfort. As did my family and my daughters. But for all the input and collegiality, the responsibility still lies with you, right or wrong. You make the final decision. For all the love you receive from family, they can’t shoulder the burden for you. With all the expert advice, no one else really sees the entire chessboard. As close as people are to you, they still can’t feel the pressure you feel.

  When I would lie in bed at night replaying all the scenarios, I found an exercise that actually helped me. My father had written a book called Why Lincoln Matters: Today More Than Ever. It took Lincoln’s principles and applied them to current-day issues. I found the book more illustrative of my father than of Lincoln. My father believed that if you hold your principles dear, you can just apply them to different fact patterns. I knew my father better than anyone did, except maybe my mother, and I knew his principles better than anyone. So I would lie in bed and have a conversation with my father. It wasn’t a dream conversation; it was just an exercise. I would list a fact pattern and ask him what he thought. And then I would provide his analysis: He would break down the facts into the relevant components and then analyze each group of facts by the applicable principles—legal, constitutional, ethical, moral, and pragmatic.

  Omnipresent with my father was the principle of responsibility. You ran for office and asked people for the job, and they vested you with authority. Respect your authority and do not demur. Don’t make excuses. Step up; do not step away. Trust the people; don’t think that you are smarter than they are. Tell them the truth, and they will do the right thing. My father very much believed in the collective conscience: that there was goodness in people, if you could engage them. He would say give it your all. Don’t relax. Don’t go easy on yourself. Don’t think you need a break. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. He would repeat what he called the Churchill quotation: “Never give up, never give up, never ever give up.” I would then tell him that wasn’t really a Churchill quotation, and he would say yes it was, and I could not prove that it wasn’t a Churchill quotation, and even if it wasn’t a Churchill quotation, it was something that Churchill would have said.

  After I went through the exercise, if my reasoning and decisions completed the exercise successfully, it would bring me some level of peace. It also highlighted my shortcomings from the previous day and showed me what I needed to focus on and improve for the next. It also made me feel as if I were not alone.

  APRIL 14 | 7,177 NEW CASES | 18,697 HOSPITALIZED | 778 DEATHS

  “We don’t have a king in this country; we didn’t want
a king.”

  IT HAD BEEN SIX WEEKS since New York had had its first case, and we had made more progress than any of the experts believed that we could. New York State had started to turn the corner. We had reached the apex of the virus’s impact, having plateaued at the end of March, when we saw the death toll spike. We had defied all the projections saying we would need 110,000 to 140,000 hospital beds. We “flattened the curve” faster than any expert believed possible.

  They did not believe that we could put such dramatic policies in place as quickly as we did. Nor did they believe that even if the government put the policies in place that people would accept them and their compliance would be as high as it was. Now I was concerned that our position was still tenuous, and searched for ways to harden New Yorkers’ resolve. There would still be many more long weeks of staying home. Also, someone else had another agenda in mind.

  For the president, the six weeks the country had spent on lockdown was not about the overwhelmed hospitals, the urgency of building up insufficient stockpiles of supplies, or bringing testing to scale, nor was it about the immeasurable human toll. He had little appetite for the role the federal government was supposed to play in a national crisis. The carnage of a virus no one could predict or control was little more than an inconvenience to him. And with every passing day, with an unemployment number that was rising faster than the death toll, the president was done waiting. He wanted to “liberate” the economy.