by Andrew Cuomo
I don’t know how many people actually read NY Forward. It might not have been a best seller; that wasn’t the point. It existed. It was not a theory or a slogan. It was sound government policy built on facts.
I had said at a briefing the week before that “how New York reopens is not an emotional question, it’s not a political question, it’s not an anecdotal question, it’s not a gut instinct question. Follow the facts and follow the data.” We now had a sound plan that implemented that vision. I was confident that we were right and we would do it our way: damn the torpedoes and damn the politics. New York would reopen smartly.
We started on May 15 opening phase 1 in much of upstate New York, followed four days later by western New York, then the capital region, then the Hudson valley, and then Long Island. Much of the state would already be in phase 2 before New York City was in phase 1 because its infection rate had been so high and because of its uniquely high population density and crowding. It would take several weeks to get to phase 4 across the state, and even then we’d be watching the numbers daily and vigilantly for hot spots and flare-ups.
MAY 17 | 1,889 NEW CASES | 5,897 HOSPITALIZED | 139 DEATHS
“Getting a test is easy. Even a governor can do it!”
OPERATIONS, OPERATIONS, OPERATIONS. ALL THE plans and all the briefings depended on being able to deliver. Even in government, the bottom line is still the bottom line. Can you do what you said you would do? Can you perform?
To me, this was a basic credibility issue, both personally and politically. As a leader, I needed to be able to accomplish what I proposed. I either produced or I failed. I was either another empty-suit, windbag politician or I was an effective leader.
It is a provable proposition and it should be proven. Accountability matters. If you don’t want to be accountable, you shouldn’t be in a government position. The people pay your salary. What did they get in return?
Operational capacity is also a metric for political validity. If we want politics to get beyond the empty rhetoric and “advocacy in action” betrayal, then government must be able to make an actual difference. If government can’t make a difference for one reason or another, then stop deceiving people. At some point, politicians have to stop making excuses and accept responsibility.
An official is elected to make a difference. Either they can or they can’t. During COVID, this became true on steroids. The timeline is short, progress or failure is evident, and the consequences could not be more dramatic.
While I spent a great deal of time working on my relationship with the people in briefings, communication, and follow-up, I put as much energy into the management of government. It’s all about the details and making the bureaucracy work.
From the beginning, we understood that setting up a testing system would be the top priority. The federal government had no interest in enacting a national testing strategy, and without testing we were flying blind. After my first conversations with the Department of Health and my own team, I knew how hard it would be to bring testing to mass scale in just weeks—but there were no options but to tackle it head-on.
To set up a testing organization required several large steps, some of which I have already described. But to review, first, the laboratories in the state capable of the highest production needed to be brought up to speed and equipped. The state lab at Wadsworth, the Northwell Health system lab, the Mount Sinai lab, the NYU Langone lab, the University of Rochester Medical Center lab, the Columbia-Presbyterian lab—with the right equipment operating seven days per week, these facilities could conduct several thousand tests per day.
The second step was to somehow mobilize the state’s smaller private laboratories into one system. New York State licenses about three hundred private labs to do clinical diagnostic testing. Each lab had to be brought online and incorporated into the system. We had to find out what equipment they had, what equipment they needed, and what supplies and reagents were needed, and we had to work with them to create a seven-day-a-week operation. As of this writing, about 250 of these labs conduct testing each day for New York State—an increase of 249 from when the FDA gave the state approval to test on February 29!
Third, we contacted the major out-of-state “reference” labs, which were national labs that did businesses across the country, such as LabCorp and Quest. These labs had enormous capacity—more than 100,000 tests per day—but were relied on by all fifty states.
Fourth, we had to locate and construct public testing sites where people would actually go to have the test taken—normally a nasal swab. Proximity was important, as were the practical logistics of a suitable site to manage the COVID challenges—long waiting lines where people congregate could end up resulting in more viral spread.
We took a multifaceted approach. We set up outdoor drive-through testing sites all across the state, using the National Guard to erect temporary tent structures, and brought in health-care providers to do the tests. For urban communities where fewer residents had cars, we set up mostly outdoor walk-in sites, but we made them appointment-only to avoid lines where the virus could spread. In addition, we partnered with Northwell Health and SOMOS Community Care to set up additional testing sites in hot-spot zip codes, including at churches and community centers, where people would feel comfortable coming to get their noses swabbed. I also signed an executive order to allow pharmacies to become test sites. Tom Feeney, a competent and hardworking staff member who is an expert at advance planning and operations, was instrumental in this effort; in July, as part of the New York delegation, he traveled to states such as Florida, Georgia, and Texas to help them set up testing sites. When all was said and done, we had more than 850 sites across the state where New Yorkers could go get a test.
Fifth, we had to convince people to go to take tests. By May 17, we had both a good and a bad problem. The good problem was that while we were doing about forty thousand tests per day, our labs and testing sites were running under capacity. The bad problem was that New Yorkers didn’t want to get tested. People were not showing up to appointments, and many still thought testing was scarce—and possibly painful! We needed to be creative. We used advertising campaigns to communicate how important testing was. We also had to ease the fear of testing. Everyone wanted to know if it would hurt.
I had the idea of getting tested at a briefing to show the public how fast and easy and painless it was. It was a good idea in concept. I had taken the test before, and having a long swab put in your nose isn’t pleasant. It can make your eyes tear and make you cough or sneeze. Normally you have a few minutes to recover afterward, and normally you don’t have a camera in your face broadcasting it on live TV.
My team said that if I did the test on TV and had a bad reaction, it would set the progress made on testing back months. I told them I was sure that I could do it. Really, I wasn’t so sure. The day of the test, I was about to go out to the briefing and I met the nurse who was going to perform the test. She seemed a little tense and was not accustomed to performing tests on national TV, for obvious reasons.
We chitchatted, and I was trying to put her at ease with my cool-dude-in-a-loose-mood banter. At one point I said something about “just taking a nasal swab.” She shook her head and was adamant in saying that it wasn’t just a nasal swab—it had to reach the inner cavity to get the best sample possible. I was disquieted. I went to the briefing and after a few minutes called up the nurse to take the test. I made a couple of bad jokes and asked her to start the test. This nurse had a swab that looked like it was a foot long. She put that swab into my nose in slow motion. It felt like she was inserting it for a good five minutes. I could see the swab going in, as it was just a couple of inches from my eyes. I could also see that the swab was not going up but apparently straight back on a horizontal trajectory. I thought nasal passages went up, not back. I had no idea where she was putting that swab, but it seemed she was aiming for the back of my head.
In any event, it worked. We expanded the list of who could get a test that day to all front-line workers as well as any of the employees returning to the workplace as part of our phased reopening. We launched a website where any New Yorker could type in their zip code and find a testing site near them. With the testing sites in all corners of the state, my pronouncement that it was “painless,” and our elimination of cost sharing, the public had no good reason not to take the test—and thousands more New Yorkers each day signed up for appointments.
MAY 29 | 1,551 NEW CASES | 3,781 HOSPITALIZED | 67 DEATHS
“Life is not about going back. Nobody goes back. We go forward.”
THE KILLING HAD HAPPENED OVER Memorial Day weekend, but it took a few days until the video was widely circulated. As had become our daily ritual, my team was assembled in the living room of the Governor’s Mansion, eating breakfast while going through the day’s numbers and PowerPoint in preparation for the morning briefing. CNN was on the television in the background when we saw the video for the first time. It was devastating to watch. The entire team stopped as the images played over and over again. We were shocked. This was murder.
Shortly after, we traveled to Iona College in Westchester County. The major announcement that day was that New York City—the once global epicenter of the pandemic—was finally set to begin to reopen and enter phase 1 on June 8. In our COVID crisis, this was a monumental day. Mayor de Blasio joined us on Zoom for the announcement. But a new crisis had emerged, and protests that began in earnest in Minneapolis were taking hold in cities nationwide.
I addressed the murder of George Floyd head-on. I said at this briefing, “I stand with the protesters.” I’ve been a prosecutor, I was attorney general of New York, and if that were my case, I’d think something criminal had occurred.
But the bigger issue was that what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis was hardly an isolated incident. This was another chapter in the book of injustice and inequality in America. “Thoughts and prayers” wouldn’t cut it.
George Floyd’s murder fit into a continuum of cases and situations that have been going on for centuries. Within the last thirty years alone, this nation witnessed the brutal assault of Rodney King in 1991. And the killings of Amadou Diallo in 1999, Sean Bell in 2006, Oscar Grant in 2009, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Laquan McDonald in 2014. Freddie Gray in 2015. Antwon Rose in 2018. Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor in 2020. It was about the same situation happening again and again and again and again. We were seeing the same injustice and no meaningful governmental response.
After years of injustice and inaction, George Floyd’s death would be the tipping point in this country. After centuries of systemic racism compounded by three and a half years of Trump—children in cages at the southern border, white nationalists in Charlottesville, the attacks on synagogues, and dog-whistle racism—the country said, No more. You can hammer a wedge into a crack in a boulder, and hammer and hammer and hammer, and eventually that boulder is going to shatter.
JUNE 1 | 941 NEW CASES | 3,331 HOSPITALIZED | 54 DEATHS
“You want to change society? You want to end the tale of two cities? You want to make it one America? You can do that. Just the way you knocked coronavirus on its rear end. People united can do anything. We showed that.”
THERE ARE VERY FEW THINGS President Trump can do to surprise me at this point. But even for him, he hit a new low. The protests over George Floyd’s murder were happening all across the country and in Washington, D.C. I was watching the nightly news at home with the girls when we saw what he had done. Trump called out the military to put down peaceful protests near the White House to execute an ill-advised and inauthentic photo op. The move was entirely predictable. It was also another grave mistake.
The George Floyd murder and the Black Lives Matter protests that grew in the wake of it, like the COVID crisis, brought partisan, racial, religious, economic, and demographic divisions front and center. It was a moment of national reckoning, and the moment cried out for national leadership. Any leader with a modicum of decency and awareness would have known what to do. In the sea of division, bring calm. When the ship of state is pitching to and fro, the captain furls the sails and steadies it.
But not Captain Trump. When Trump sees division, he seeks to aggravate it. Calling in the military was another cheap appeal to his base, and it infuriated the protesters. What Trump didn’t appreciate was how repulsed and offended the majority of decent Americans were at witnessing the George Floyd murder.
Trump was incapable of seeing the Floyd murder for what it was: un-American. America doesn’t knock someone to the ground and then step on the person. Americans don’t gang up and kick a man when he’s down. Seeing four uniformed police officers holding down and suffocating a man to death stung the American conscience. But Trump missed it. The great irony is that Trump was obsessively consumed with winning his own reelection, but he was also blinded by his obsession. The George Floyd murder, like the COVID crisis, was a moment when Trump could have stepped up to lead this nation and actually helped his reelection.
Instead, he used the military to push the protesters away from the White House. It was broadcast live, and it was ugly. But then it got even worse. Attorney General Bill Barr appeared in the midst of this chaos as the military were teargassing and forcing back the peaceful demonstrators. The next scene on TV showed the president walking out of the White House to the church next door for a photo opportunity, holding up a Bible and telling Americans that he would ensure order. It was a truly disturbing sight. Watching the president, the military, and Attorney General Barr, I imagined a military dictator taking control of a country.
I made a wager with my daughters that night. I often like to say to them, “I will bet you $10,” as a way to get their attention and excite their competitive edge. I said, “I see the future. Donald Trump is going to lose the election in November and then claim voter fraud is the reason he lost, claiming that mail-in ballots were fraudulent and that the Post Office mishandled the mailings. Attorney General Barr will bring the lawsuit on behalf of the United States, and it will go to the Supreme Court. Trump will believe that the Supreme Court will side with him because he will have the support of his Court appointments. He will believe that it will be a repeat of Bush v. Gore.”
I went further. “But Trump will be wrong. The Supreme Court will rule against Trump because his position cannot be supported under the law and he misjudges the basic integrity of the Supreme Court, even his own appointees.”
I explained my rationale to my daughters. Even though Trump was first elected because of this country’s division, most Americans would not think their president would be the cause for further division. A majority of Americans were not comfortable seeing their president create racial tension and aggravate unrest. Now they would not vote to deliberately increase the tension. Americans also knew that the federal government’s denial and incompetence on COVID caused more Americans to die.
The attorney general will bring the lawsuit, I said, because he is first and foremost a political Trump ally. Trump had already subtly signaled the grounds for his lawsuit by stating that he opposed mail-in ballots (which would be used more widely in November because of COVID), alleging that they were vehicles for Democratic fraud.
The girls listened. And seemed intrigued. None of them would take the wager. Today, I would put up a lot more money.
* * *
—
I SUPPO
RTED THE protesters, and it was my hope that Mr. Floyd’s killing and its aftermath would present a moment in which this nation actually learned and grew and progressed—this time by enacting real change. George Floyd could not be just another name on that long, long list.
The protests presented new complications in the time of COVID, because they were massive gatherings. Thankfully, they were held outdoors and most protesters wore masks, but ironically, many of the police did not. And local governments were still being timid in enforcing the mask order. The protests ignited opposition to the police department, and I think the local politicians were afraid to aggressively enforce any laws at this moment. There was no doubt that the circumstances posed a great risk, but the virus’s presence in New York was already at a very low point before the protests began. I signed an executive order that allowed all protesters to be eligible for a COVID test and encouraged them to take it. Hopefully, if our data was right, the presence of the virus might have been so low there was not a great risk of spread. We would know soon enough.
Trump still wouldn’t wear a mask, and he continued to make it a purely political issue. He said health officials had taken different positions on masks, and he was correct there. But it was clear now from all the research that masks work. I also signed an executive order allowing a private business to deny admission to a person who didn’t wear a mask. Wearing a mask is so simple and makes such a big difference.
Despite all of our progress, it was clear that now we were facing two parallel crises: COVID and the unrest after the murder of George Floyd. A public health crisis and a social crisis, and they both demanded action.