Gov. Andrew Cuomo Had the Worst Response to the Crisis of Any Governor in America
The press has been gushing about the performance of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for weeks. The media often compares Cuomo’s “decisive” response to the coronavirus pandemic to the president, and guess who always wins?
Whether it’s good PR from the governor’s office or just the media worshipping a liberal who says mean things about Donald Trump, it hardly matters. What matters is results. And in that department, Andrew Cuomo has been a miserable failure — using several metrics.
And it’s not just the numbers. The panicky, sometimes hysterical New York governor began whining about the federal government (specifically the president) not doing anything to help the states with getting medical supplies. Back in March, he kept saying he needed 30-40,000 ventilators. And when Trump pointed out that was silly, he accused the president of being an unfeeling monster.
“I have a feeling that a lot of the numbers that are being said in some areas are just bigger than they’re going to be,” Trump said on March 27. “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators,” he added, referring to Cuomo’s estimate for New York state. Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and others said they had “facts” on their side.
By the middle of April, New York was sending ventilators to other states.
But the number of deaths in New York from the coronavirus is what condemns Cuomo and marks him as incompetent.
As of yesterday, New York had experienced 18,610 deaths, nearly 30 percent of the total number of deaths out of 64,406 in the United States. Yes, New York has a high population density, but so does California. And the Golden State has twice as many people and only 2,135 deaths.
Even high population density states on the East Coast are doing better than New York. Pennsylvania, for instance, has two-thirds the population of New York and a similar population density (New York’s is 358 people per square mile, Pennsylvania’s 278 per square mile), but the Keystone State only has 2,418 deaths. It’s not population density that’s contributed to the coronavirus tragedy in New York. It’s bad governance.
This is “competence”? This is “decisiveness”?
Cuomo didn’t lock down the state until March 20 — not until there were nearly 3,000 cases of COVID-19 in the state. Nobody recalls Cuomo arguing with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio over who had the authority to close the schools after most major cities had already shuttered the schools. Meanwhile, New Yorkers were getting sick and many eventually died.
Then there are the nursing homes. Yesterday, they found 100 dead bodies in a Brooklyn nursing home. And fingers are pointing at Cuomo’s policies. Former Governor George Pataki made it clear whose fault it was.
Former Gov. George Pataki slammed Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s nursing home policies during the coronavirus pandemic as a “disaster” that may have unnecessarily caused the deaths of “thousands” of vulnerable elderly residents.In a rare swipe at his successor Friday night, Pataki called for an independent probe “so this never happens again.”Pataki said the state Health Department should never have issued an edict requiring nursing homes to accept coronavirus virus patients into nursing home facilities filled with sick, elderly patients — the population most at risk from the killer COVID-19 bug.
Cuomo’s order came when he was panicking about a possible lack of hospital beds.
Compounding the misguided policy, Pataki said, is that the nursing homes lacked the personal protective equipment or testing capability to isolate and contain the spread of COVID-19.Pataki also said he was dumbfounded as to why infected patients were sent to nursing homes instead of “hundreds of unused beds” at the two temporary hospitals at the Javits Center and the Navy’s USNS Comfort hospital ship.
The Navy hospital ship Comfort left the dock this past week after treating few patients.
“Gov. Cuomo’s handling of the nursing homes has been a disaster,” said Pataki.“Thousands of people [sic] lives might not have been lost except for these tragic policies.”
The same might be said of Cuomo’s handling of the entire crisis.
Cuomo’s panicky orders resulted in wasted resources and incompetent management.
In addition to a bevy of state orders, Gov. Andrew Cuomo made desperate overtures to the federal government to step in. In response, and in record time, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers scrambled to erect at least four field hospitals, and the Navy deployed its USNS Comfort hospital ship to Manhattan.However, those efforts – and the many millions of dollars spent on them – have largely been deemed a waste, even as New York has battled a soaring a death toll and is maintaining stay-at-home orders.
One of those field hospitals in the 2500-bed Javits Center treated about 1,000 patients over the month it was operational.
Maybe it would be a godsend for the Democrats to dump Joe Biden from the ticket and acclaim Andrew Cuomo their nominee for president. The myth of Cuomo’s superior crisis management would be exposed in short order, leading to an easy Trump victory.
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