Four years ago today, New York City mourned the first death from the virus called SARS-CoV-2 and the disease we now call COVID-19. Perhaps you recall what happened next: Hospitals overflowed, schools closed, essential workers kept doing their jobs to applause from windows, people masked up, government struggled to answer dozens of interconnected challenges, and people died before and after a vaccine arrived.
New York City has lost more than 46,000 lives to the plague; the statewide total now approaches 84,000. Nationwide, COVID deaths have topped 1.1 million, with the United States’ fatality rate far exceeding that in other countries with advanced medical systems.
What the federal government under Donald Trump got wrong could fill a book, and indeed it has filled many volumes detailing the politicization of science, the triumph of wishful thinking over rapid marshaling of resources, the failure of departments and layers of bureaucracy to coordinate.
But New York leaders made their own share of bad decisions, many of them understandable at a time when we were all fumbling to understand what we were facing, but some of them not. Then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo once absurdly proclaimed then-President Trump “responsible for every COVID death in New York.” The truth, notwithstanding the poster of a conquered mountain of deaths Cuomo commissioned and sold on the state government website, is the governor and then-Mayor de Blasio fumbled plenty.
The systems of government didn’t work smoothly together, and egos often made matters worse. This was most apparent in the brutal early days, but it has dogged the response all along.
We say this as an Editorial Board that heaped praise on many elements of Cuomo’s leadership, and still does so in hindsight. His daily briefings were candid and informative. His decisions were often swift and strong. His decision to send COVID patients back to nursing homes, while unwise, was not responsible for nearly as many deaths as politically motivated critics often claim. That said, it’s true the governor and his staff would go on, in the words of the state comptroller, to “mislead the public” about those death totals.
But a pandemic that took so many lives is much bigger than any leader. If New York is to learn from its response and reform its health care systems and its wider government so that they are better positioned the next time a highly contagious and deadly bug rears its head, it needs to do a deep dive, commissioning an independent look at what went wrong and how it can be fixed. New Jersey just released its own 910-page report; it includes hundreds of recommendations to do things better the next time around.
In 2022, Gov. Hochul commissioned a review of the state’s pandemic response by an outside firm; that report isn’t expected until the middle of this year. But we already know it won’t be enough, because the firm lacks the authority to subpoena witnesses. Legislation kicking around Albany with bipartisan support would go further, setting up an independent state panel with full access to state records, including confidential materials, and the power to interview witnesses under subpoena.
Make it law. Learn the good, bad and ugly of what went right and wrong. There are thousands of lives to honor, and thousands to save.
