I’m baffled how many people think Andrew Cuomo has done such a wonderful job over the past four months. When you look into what has actually happened and peel back the layers of incompetence, missteps, bizarre executive orders and just flat out stupidity, you’ll see a different picture.
Some Democrats have discussed him as a possible replacement for Joe Biden, due to Biden’s perceived weakness as a nominee and others have talked about his sex appeal. The truth is, he should be one of the most loathed officials in America right now.
Why?
Lets start here:
On March 9, days after Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency, he made a dramatic announcement. “Open the curtain please,” Cuomo said at his daily briefing. “We are introducing New York State Clean hand sanitizer made conveniently by the state of New York," Cuomo said. Hand sanitizer was flying off shelves and prices were skyrocketing. “It has a very nice floral bouquet.”
The state’s product, Cuomo said, would be free for schools, state offices, and communities hit hard by the coronavirus. What some people didn’t realize, it was being made by inmates in state prisons.
In Vice:
On March 9, New York governor Andrew Cuomo announced a measure to fight “egregious” price-gouging: an initiative to produce 100,000 gallons of New York State-produced hand sanitizer every week, to be distributed for free to needy institutions like schools, government agencies, prisons, and the MTA.
“We are problem solvers, state of New York, Empire State, progressive capital of the nation,” Cuomo said during a press conference, before opening a navy curtain and literally unveiling jugs of the “NYS Clean”-branded sanitizer, “made conveniently by the state of New York.”
But according to workers at Great Meadow Correctional Facility in Comstock, New York where the hand sanitizer is being “made,” as well as a spokesperson for the prison system, they are doing nothing more than taking existing hand sanitizer and rebottling it into packaging labeled "NYS Clean."
Cuomo bragged that the NYS hand sanitizer was “superior” due to its high alcohol content (75% to Purell’s 70%) and joked that it was even floral scented, like tulips and hydrangeas. He also touted its price as a major upside. “This is also much less expensive than anything the government could buy—a gallon bottle is $6.10, the 7-ounce bottle is $1.12 our cost, and then there’s a very small size… which is 84 cents. So it’s much cheaper for us to make it ourselves than to buy it on the open market.”
On May 15th, there was a report by North Country Public Radio detailing a coronavirus outbreak at one of the facilities who bottled this hand sanitizer. The place where they were making hand sanitizer to protect the public from COVID-19 now had its own outbreak.
I read a ProPublica report that was released recently. It outlined several of Cuomo’s catastrophic missteps of the governor’s office and New York City Mayor Bill De blasio, which likely resulted in many thousands of coronavirus cases. ProPublica contrasts what happened in New York with what went on in California. In the middle of May, New York City alone had almost 20,000 deaths, while in San Francisco there had been only 35, and New York state as a whole suffered 10 times as many deaths as California. Federal failures played a role, but what we see happening in New York State stem from Andrew Cuomo and Bill De blasio’s decisions.
Asked if Cuomo questioned the accuracy or integrity of the findings on how many deaths might have been prevented with an earlier imposition of the statewide shut down, a spokesman wrote:
“Our job is to make policy decisions based on the facts and data we have at the time and that’s exactly what we did. We needed the public’s buy-in, which is what happened, and how we ultimately flattened the curve.”
In recent days, Cuomo has said he wished he had been quicker to see the threat, “blow the bugle” and take action, only to all but instantly shift tone and cast blame everywhere: at international and U.S. health agencies; at the federal government; at news organizations.
“Governors don’t do global pandemics,” Cuomo said.
Now we have an in-depth review of the coronavirus response detailed in The Wall Street Journal. They detail how a hasty expansion of medical facilities by state, city and hospital leaders led to grave mistakes”
The Wall Street Journal talked to nearly 90 front-line doctors, nurses, health-care workers, hospital administrators and government officials, and reviewed emails, legal documents and memos, to analyze what went wrong. Among the missteps they identify:
• Improper patient transfers. Some patients were too sick to have been transferred between hospitals. Squabbling between the Cuomo and de Blasio administrations contributed to an uncoordinated effort.
• Insufficient isolation protocols. Hospitals often mixed infected patients with the uninfected early on, and the virus spread to non-Covid-19 units.
• Inadequate staff planning. Hospitals added hundreds of intensive-care beds but not always enough trained staff, leading to improper treatments and overlooked patients dying alone.
• Mixed messages. State, city government and hospital officials kept shifting guidelines about when exposed and ill front-line workers should return to work.
• Overreliance on government sources for key equipment. Hospitals turned to the state and federal government for hundreds of ventilators, but many were faulty or inadequate.
• Procurement-planning gaps. While leaders focused attention on procuring ventilators, hospitals didn’t always provide for adequate supplies of critical resources including oxygen, vital-signs monitors and dialysis machines.
• Incomplete staff-protection policies. Many hospitals provided staff with insufficient protective equipment and testing.
In The Nation, they wrote about how the governor’s position on health care spending and how it looked starkly different a couple of months ago:
As the novel coronavirus rages in New York, killing more than a thousand and locking down millions, Governor Andrew Cuomo has emerged as the hero of the moment. On television, he is everything Donald Trump is not: calm, coherent, and blunt, in a strangely reassuring way. He is becoming a #resistance hero. Some people are (literally) falling in love with him.
But the same Cuomo who is racing to expand New York’s hospital capacity and crying out for more federal resources is quietly trying to slash Medicaid funding in the state, enraging doctors and nurses, and elected officials of his own party. The same Cuomo who holds press briefings at a major New York City convention center, now the home of a temporary 1,000-bed hospital, presided over a decade of hospital closures and consolidations, prioritizing cost savings over keeping popular health care institutions open.
It’s the same Democratic governor—every liberal pundit’s tried-and-true Trump antidote—who is doing damage to his state’s health care system at the worst possible moment, in the eyes of the critics who follow him most closely.
Cutting Medicaid has been a priority of Cuomo’s since he took office in 2011. In his first term, another Medicaid Redesign Team shrunk Medicaid reimbursements, damaging the financially fragile health care facilities that serve low-income patients. Hospitals, meanwhile, have been shutting their doors across the state. Part of this reflects a national trend toward consolidation and a movement to ambulatory and outpatient care, as well as the inflation of medical costs and a change in federal reimbursement formulas for Medicare and Medicaid.
What’s more, the state has lost more than 20,000 hospital beds over the last 20 years. Cuomo, who has governed for almost half that period, never advocated for any kind of expansion of hospital beds until last month; he now says New York needs 110,000 beds, more than double the current capacity. He has never been a forceful advocate for keeping hospitals open; in fact, he’s empowered bureaucrats who’ve argued aggressively to shutter them.
I never liked Cuomo. The more I read about him and see, the more I dislike his policies and approach to governing. It’s disturbing that so many are making Cuomo the hero of the pandemic when he should be one of the villains. He’s viewed as a savior for addressing a problem that he partly caused. This is because Donald Trump has mangled the coronavirus response, so that Cuomo – by not being a complete buffoon – looks brilliant by contrast.
Democrats often say, “at least our politicians are better than Republicans.” That’s quite a low bar indeed. Especially if you’re comparing them to Trump. It’s setting yourself up for failure. Too many can be led astray by amoral and incompetent leaders who more often than not, betray progressive values regularly.
Something Interesting:
I watched this with my kids last week. I saw it a while ago and back in 2003/2004, I was a drum sub at the revival of the show on Broadway. I still think its a great and a lit of fun:
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Clayton Craddock is an independent thinker, father of two beautiful children in New York City. He is the drummer of the hit broadway musical Ain’t Too Proud. He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration from Howard University’s School of Business and is a 25 year veteran of the fast paced New York City music scene. He has played drums in a number of hit broadway and off-broadway musicals including “Tick, tick…BOOM!, Altar Boyz, Memphis The Musical and Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar and Grill. In addition, Clayton has worked on: Footloose, Motown, The Color Purple, Rent, Little Shop of Horrors, Evita, Cats, and Avenue Q.