While New York’s formal pandemic response plan underscores the need for seamless communication between state and local officials, the state Health Department broke off routine sharing of information and strategy with its city counterpart in February, just as the size of the menace was becoming clearer, according to both a city official and a city employee. “Radio silence,” said the city official. To this day, the city employee said, the city can’t always get basic data from the state, such as counts of ventilators at hospitals or nursing home staff. “It’s like they have been ordered not to talk to us,” the person said. …
For his part, de Blasio spent critical weeks spurning his own Health Department’s increasingly urgent belief that trying to contain the spread of the virus was a fool’s errand. The clear need, as early as late February, was to move to an all-out effort at not being overrun by the disease, which meant closing things down and restricting people’s movements. The frustration within the department grew so intense, according to one city official, plans were discussed to undertake a formal “resistance”; the department would do what needed to be done, the mayor’s directives be damned. …
ProPublica spoke with a half a dozen epidemiologists who said the events in New Rochelle could have been an opportunity for Cuomo to have acted more boldly and broadly. Instead of treating the threat as isolated to Westchester County, Cuomo could have seen a sign of wider infection in tightly packed New York City that hadn’t been detected because of inadequate testing.
“What made anyone in New York think it wasn’t going to get hit, and hit hard?” asked Rupak Shivakoti, an epidemiologist at Columbia. When you’re dealing with a pandemic’s exponential growth in the number of infections, he said, “even a week makes a huge difference.”
