Cuomo sells poster bragging about NY COVID-19 response

Post Reply New Topic

Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo is facing intense backlash for selling a poster touting New York's response to the coronavirus outbreak.

On Monday, Cuomo debuted a poster he designed called "New York Tough" that he suggests captures the journey his state went through while addressing the pandemic.

"I love history. I love poster art. Poster art is something they did in the early 1900s, late 1800s, when they had to communicate their whole platform on one piece of paper," Cuomo stated. "Over the past few years I’ve done my own posters that capture that feeling. I did a new one for what we went through with COVID and I think the general shape is familiar to you. We went up the mountain, we curved the mountain, we came down the other side and these are little telltale signs that, to me, represent what was going on."

The poster depicts a mountain with essential workers pulling a rope symbolizing the "flattening of the curve."

On top of the poster reads a quote attributed to the governor, "Wake up America! Forget the politics, get smart!"

The poster features an airplane with "Europeans," "COVID-19," "Jan-Mar," and "3 million" on it, suggesting that the virus mostly came from Europe instead of China, where the disease is believed to have originated.

Also seen on the poster are masks, social distancing, and President Trump sitting on a crescent moon saying, "It's just the flu."

According to the pre-order page, the poster costs $14.50 plus shipping and handling and that "New York State does not profit from the sale of this poster."

Cuomo's poster was blasted on social media.

On top of the poster reads a quote attributed to the governor, "Wake up America! Forget the politics, get smart!"

The poster features an airplane with "Europeans," "COVID-19," "Jan-Mar," and "3 million" on it, suggesting that the virus mostly came from Europe instead of China, where the disease is believed to have originated.

Also seen on the poster are masks, social distancing, and President Trump sitting on a crescent moon saying, "It's just the flu."

According to the pre-order page, the poster costs $14.50 plus shipping and handling and that "New York State does not profit from the sale of this poster."

Cuomo's poster was blasted on social media.

He's actually selling his self-congratulatory poster that's centered around a visual representation of 32,000 deaths," Tablet Magazine associated editor Noah Baum reacted. "Was Cuomo always this repugnant or does this much media flattery make anyone lose perspective?"

"Your inaction and infighting with the Mayor caused thousands of deaths," activist and former Sanders surrogate Shaun King told Cuomo. "Nearly every expert in the nation says had you acted sooner it could’ve saved nearly 10,000 lives. That you think it’s time for posters touting your 'success' is troubling."

"The narcissism and gall is stunning," journalist Jeryl Bier tweeted.

Through much of the coronavirus crisis, there has been growing scrutiny over the Democratic governor's order in late March that forced nursing homes to accept patients who tested positive for coronavirus, despite testing deficiencies for both residents and staff. Cuomo signed an executive order on May 11 reversing the policy, stopping hospitals from sending infected patients back to nursing homes and ramping up testing for staff.

The Associated Press reported last week that “New York hospitals released more than 6,300 recovering coronavirus patients into nursing homes during the height” of the coronavirus pandemic under a “controversial, now-scrapped policy

A 39-year-old woman took Flight 701 from Doha, Qatar, to John F. Kennedy International Airport in late February, the final leg of her trip home to New York City from Iran.

A week later, on March 1, she tested positive for the coronavirus, the first confirmed case in New York City of an outbreak that had already devastated China and parts of Europe. The next day, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, appearing with Mayor Bill de Blasio at a news conference, promised that health investigators would track down every person on the woman’s flight. But no one did.

A day later, a lawyer from New Rochelle, a New York City suburb, tested positive for the virus — an alarming sign because he had not traveled to any affected country, suggesting community spread was already taking place.

For many days after the first positive test, as the coronavirus silently spread throughout the New York region, Mr. Cuomo, Mr. de Blasio and their top aides projected an unswerving confidence that the outbreak would be readily contained.

There would be cases, they repeatedly said, but New York’s hospitals were some of the best in the world. Plans were in place. Responses had been rehearsed during “tabletop” exercises. After all, the city had been here before — Ebola, Zika, the H1N1 virus, even Sept. 11.

“Excuse our arrogance as New Yorkers — I speak for the mayor also on this one — we think we have the best health care system on the planet right here in New York,” Mr. Cuomo said on March 2. “So, when you’re saying, what happened in other countries versus what happened here, we don’t even think it’s going to be as bad as it was in other countries.”

Epidemiologists have pointed to New York City’s density and its role as an international hub of commerce and tourism to explain why the coronavirus has spread so rapidly. And it seems highly unlikely that any response by the state or city could have fully stopped the pandemic.

From the earliest days of the crisis, state and city officials were also hampered by a chaotic and often dysfunctional federal response, including significant problems with the expansion of coronavirus testing, which made it far harder to gauge the scope of the outbreak.

As a result, state and city officials often had to make decisions early on without full assistance from the federal government.

Even so, the initial efforts by New York officials to stem the outbreak were hampered by their own confused guidance, unheeded warnings, delayed decisions and political infighting, The New York Times found.
“Flu was coming down, and then you saw this new ominous spike. And it was Covid. And it was spreading widely in New York City before anyone knew it,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and former commissioner of the city’s Health Department. “You have to move really fast. Hours and days. Not weeks. Once it gets a head of steam, there is no way to stop it.”

Dr. Frieden said that if the state and city had adopted widespread social-distancing measures a week or two earlier, including closing schools, stores and restaurants, then the estimated death toll from the outbreak might have been reduced by 50 to 80 percent.

But New York mandated those measures after localities in states including California and Washington had done so.

San Francisco, for example, ordered schools closed on March 12 when that city had 18 confirmed cases; Ohio also ordered its schools closed on the same day, with five confirmed cases. Mr. de Blasio ordered schools in New York to close three days later when the city had 329 cases.

Then seven Bay Area counties imposed stay-at-home rules on March 17. Two days later, the entire state of California ordered the same. New York State’s stay-at-home order came on the 20th, and went into effect on March 22.

From the start, Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Cuomo projected as much concern about panic as they did about the virus.

That tone continued even after the first positive case was announced on March 1.

“Everybody is doing exactly what we need to do,” said Mr. Cuomo, seated with Mr. de Blasio, at a news conference on March 2. “We have been ahead of this from Day 1.”

Hospitals also expressed confidence in their plans for responding to a pandemic, with the Healthcare Association of New York State declaring on March 2 that its members were “prepared for an influx of patients caused by Covid-19.”

But few, if any, appeared to have made significant efforts before the virus hit to greatly increase supplies of ventilators or protective gear, looking instead to draw on emergency government stockpiles.

Officials seemed to speak and act based on the assumption that the virus had not arrived in the state until that first case — the woman traveling from Iran. State and local officials now acknowledge that the virus was almost certainly in New York much earlier.

Infectious disease specialists had known for weeks before any positive test had occurred that many of the early cases would be missed because of significant flaws in federal testing.

For both city and state, the initial plan was to trace, isolate and contain each case. Mr. Cuomo promised that they would go further than necessary to find every connection to the woman who arrived from Iran.

“Out of an abundance of caution we will be contacting the people who were on the flight with her from Iran to New York,” he said.

But no one ever did that work. Local officials could only request an investigation from the C.D.C., and the agency did not perform one because they believed at the time she had not been contagious during the flight, officials said. Neither Mr. Cuomo nor Mr. de Blasio publicly mentioned finding the plane passengers again.

That’s because new cases in the area kept emerging: the lawyer in New Rochelle who worked in Manhattan but had no connection to the first case and had not traveled to countries affected by the virus. Then two more people in New York City tested positive, also unconnected to the affected countries and, more ominously, to each other.

New York City’s system for detecting infectious diseases was flashing danger.

While only about 100 cases of the coronavirus had been confirmed in the whole state, the city’s surveillance system was, by the end of the first week in March, signaling a spike in influenza-like illnesses at emergency rooms. A few days later, the number of police officers calling out sick jumped noticeably, as did calls to 911 for fever and cough.
The governor and the mayor began taking limited steps to restrict people’s activities, but even those were met with resistance.

Locals complained when the governor ordered a porous “containment area” for New Rochelle, where a cluster had emerged. It meant closing schools and gathering places in a one-mile radius of a synagogue at the center of the outbreak, while allowing movement in and out.

Each day brought some new action.

The governor declared a state of emergency, worked to expand testing capacity and, later, secured the construction of field hospitals. The mayor and the governor encouraged work-from-home. They restricted large gatherings to 500 people, and reduced by half the occupancy for restaurants and bars. Broadway closed. So did most other big entertainment venues.

Still some people flouted the rules, continuing to gather in public.

But the biggest and most prolonged battle centered on closing the city’s school system, with its 1.1 million students. Doing so would amount to a virtual shutdown of the city.

State and city officials believed they were doing everything possible to confront the outbreak, moving from big decision to big decision so quickly that each day, they said, felt like a year. They blamed the spread in New York on the federal government, which they say dragged its feet on testing. For weeks, Mr. Trump brushed aside concerns that the outbreak would damage the country.

“We have it totally under control,” Mr. Trump said in late January. A month later, he advised Americans to “view this the same as the flu.”

But local officials did have control over closing schools and businesses. While they waited on making a decision, other major cities were moving toward shutdowns.

In California, Los Angeles followed San Francisco’s lead and ordered its schools closed on March 13, after 40 cases of the virus had been confirmed. On that same day, there were nearly four times as many confirmed cases in New York, but City Hall did not yet support closing schools.

And even as aides to the mayor and governor, both Democrats, worked closely together on the response, old rivalries crept in. Though the two leaders put up a unified front at the outset of the outbreak, it was clear by the middle of March that a high-stakes version of their longstanding political battles was playing out. The March 2 news conference has been their only appearance together.

First, Mr. Cuomo sought to force the mayor’s hand on the schools, state officials said.

As the city prepared an announcement to close the schools, Mr. Cuomo announced the shutdown during a television appearance. Mr. de Blasio made it official that evening, and then announced restaurants and bars would be closed for everything but takeout and delivery.

New Yorkers would probably soon have to be kept at home for all but the most necessary needs, he said on March 17 — a “shelter-in-place” order similar to what had already been implemented in the Bay Area of California.
This time, Mr. Cuomo was the one who resisted. He favored a more gradual shutdown.

“I’m as afraid of the fear and the panic as I am of the virus, and I think that the fear is more contagious than the virus right now,” the governor said when asked two days later about the mayor’s comments.

He chastised the mayor for a poor communication strategy.

But then California moved first: Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a statewide order for residents to stay at home. The state had 675 confirmed cases of the virus.

That same day, March 19, New York had more than 4,152.

That night, roughly 20 prominent New York leaders — including local members of Congress, two borough presidents, City Council members and civic and religious figures — joined a conference call convened by the state attorney general, Letitia James.

“I was growing very frustrated over the schism between the mayor and the governor,” said one person on the call, who captured the sentiment. After the call, a participant conveyed those feelings to the governor’s office.

Melissa DeRosa, the governor’s top aide, said Mr. Cuomo decided on his plan to “pause” New York during an afternoon meeting with his health commissioner, before the call or Mr. Newsom’s order.

The governor had been reviewing disturbing projections about the spread of the virus since 4:30 a.m., she said.

“OK, let’s shut it down,” she recalled the governor saying. He announced it the next day.

By that point, March 20, the state had more than 7,000 confirmed cases.

“This is an enemy that we have underestimated from Day 1,” Mr. Cuomo said on Monday. “And we have paid the price dearly.”