By John Hinderaker | Powerline
New York Governor Andy Cuomo, like President Trump, is
delivering daily coronavirus briefings. Unlike President Trump, he is being
swooned over by liberal reporters. At American Greatness, Julie Kelly collects
some examples. Here is just one:
“If
social media is a reflection of how people are feeling, Cuomo’s image during
the coronavirus outbreak is one of authority, yet hope—a role people value
enough to begin visualizing his presidency,” one smitten CBS News reporter
cooed.
This is odd, if only because New York is the epicenter of
COVID-19 infection in the U.S. The disease is more widespread there, and more
problematic, than anywhere else. According to the CDC, New York has 38,977
COVID-19 cases out of the country’s 85,356, vastly more than any other state.
California has 3,777, and Washington 3,207. So why would those in charge of New
York’s response to the epidemic be held up as heroes, and Cuomo touted as a
replacement for Joe Biden as Democratic presidential nominee?
The fact that New York is the epicenter of the COVID
crisis in the U.S. is no coincidence. It flows from the policies of Governor
Cuomo and New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio, as well as New York City’s nature as an
international hub and a closely-packed city. Back to Julie Kelly:
[N]either
Cuomo nor New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio deserve attaboys. A toxic
combination of Big Apple hubris, devotion to open borders regardless of the
imminent threat, and Trump-hating obstinacy fueled a stubborn strategy that
left their citizens vulnerable for months.
Further,
New York’s political leaders have acknowledged that the world’s financial
capital—a city home to nearly 9 million people, the most densely populated city
in the country—has no comprehensive plan to deal with a pandemic or any viral
public health threat.
Governor Cuomo came very late to the effort to shut down
the Chinese virus:
By
January 31, the day President Trump suspended flights from China, “outbreaks
were already growing in over 30 cities across 26 countries, most seeded by
travelers from Wuhan,” according to one model by the New York Times.
But
even by late February, Cuomo boasted about his state’s accessibility to foreign
travelers—his state, the governor said on February 26, is the “front door” for
visitors from around the world—while only instituting voluntary quarantines for
suspected coronavirus carriers.
“Our
operating paradigm has always been, prepare for the worst but hope for the
best,” Cuomo said.
That
paradigm, apparently, did not include prohibiting hundreds of thousands of
potentially infected travelers from entering his state since January. Tourists
and business travelers continued to pour into the Big Apple during the first
several days of March without any comprehensive screening or restrictions.
Cuomo
this week again bragged about his state’s open arms, which resulted in New
York’s current crisis. The reason New York now has so many more cases of
coronavirus, even more than California, is “because we welcome people from
across the globe,” he said on March 25. “We have people coming here, we have
people who came here from China, who came here from Italy, who came here from
all across the globe.”
Nice going, Governor! Open borders take priority over
everything, including your own constituents’ lives.
New York’s hospitals are overburdened and experiencing
problems, but this is not a recent development:
A public policy researcher in 2015 detailed
long waits in New York City emergency rooms. The head of the emergency
department for the Mount Sinai hospital system quit in 2018 after less than a
year on the job.
“I
had to follow my moral compass and leave and decide this is not an organization
that cares for patients,” Dr. Eric Barton told the New York Post.
Last
year, city nurses threatened to strike due to overcrowding at three major
hospital systems. “Nurse Anthony Ciampa said he had to choose recently between
feeding an elderly patient at New York Presbyterian and treating several
acutely ill patients because there weren’t enough other nurses on duty,”
according to a March 2019 report in the Daily News.
And
the outcry about ventilators? State officials were informed several years ago
that the stockpile of ventilators was woefully inadequate to handle a severe
pandemic. But instead of preparing for a looming crisis and buying 16,000
ventilators, the state’s health commissioner formed a task force to develop a
system to ration the life-saving equipment. The task force “came up with rules
that will be imposed when ventilators run short,” the New York Post reported
last week.
Now, of course, the same incompetent reporters who are
swooning over Cuomo blame President Trump for longstanding problems in New
York’s hospital system.
In a sane world, the idea that the governor of the state
with by far the worst coronavirus record would be singled out for praise by
reporters would be unthinkable. But of course, we do not live in a sane
world–not a sane media world, anyway.
