I agree. Everybody was making decisions based on very little data and doing their best. I didn’t post that article to criticize Cuomo but to respond to someone who believed nursing homes were only vulnerable to infection from the employees and to point out a reason that deaths in nursing homes varied due to different policies in place. The more we all know about how and why things are happening, the better decisions we can all make.
I’ve been complaining for a while about the continued lack of PPE at local hospitals. But now that I know that the PPE in our state was diverted to nursing homes, I understand better and think it’s a reasonable decision. Not that it’s OK that PPE for hospital workers is still inadequate, but when you don’t have enough to go around how and why you allocate the scare resources matters and I can’t argue with the idea that most of the PPE should be going to the most vulnerable people in the hardest hit areas and in this state that was nursing homes and certain cities. Makes sense.
I have a very good idea how these places are staffed, and that’s why I know you can prohibit workers from working at more than one place. You pay them not to.
You can’t divert PPE to nursing homes when your hospitals are being overrun with thousands of very sick and dying people. If the medical personnel aren’t being protected as best as possible, there wouldn’t be any health care professional left to care for anyone.
Now the issue is lower SES areas , populated by people of color, who are disproportionately being effected by CV-19 all over the country. NY finally has a program that’s off the ground to address this. But public policy takes months to formulate and implementing them takes time.
It’s especially difficult when the one Federal agency tasked with public health policy and issuing guidance, has had their budget slashed and has agency personnel being silenced along with the guidance for re-opening shelved for weeks, until it was leaked and there had to be hearings about it. Who wants to bet if there hadn’t been a whistleblower that it would still not be released.
We did have a Pandemic handbook, which was put in the trash bin and an office in the NSC (iirc) whose sole job was monitoring epidemics around the world which was disbanded.
As a country we were woefully unprepared. And the sad thing is we still are.
Yes, we were unprepared and still are. But we can learn from what is happening and make better choices personally and encourage better choices from our governments - local, state, federal. It’s not over yet. We’re still early in the process. Let’s keep examining the data, see what’s working and put it in place as we can. Missed opportunities are disappointing, but no reason we can’t do better for the next wave(s) we all know are coming. Plus, now we have a better understanding of what is -and isn’t - realistic.
It’s been interesting to see the articles about why certain things were done. Probably a combination of poor communication style and lack of media coverage, but it appears to me that our governor was making at least some reasonable decisions that even people like me who widely read and are aware of issues didn’t know about. We also had a range of local (city, county and even community) governments that independently made good decisions to protect people. I’m encouraged by that. I’m hoping that level of analysis is still happening in the next few months when the next spike of infections start.
I’m also hoping that states and local communities are looking at what’s working (and not) in other areas so they can incorporate it in future actions.
More mistakes will be make. More leaders and federal/state/local orgs will sidestep instead of step up. But that doesn’t mean all is lost.
Years from now, it will be very interesting to see how local vs. federal actions did or di not make a difference.
Remember how quickly events have developed. When this was happening - deciding how to hand out federal stockpiled supplies - there were almost no tests and not much way to know where the infections really were. It might have been that Oregon had 8x as many infected as NJ, there was no way to know. So they were handing out the PPE based on population. We know now that infections weren’t tied to population, but nobody knew that then.
This was within a week of when several posters lambasted me for suggesting it was a bad idea to lick their fingers to open produce bags, for example. They lectured me about how most people didn’t care about that, it wasn’t a big deal and it was my problem. So… little information out there. People still guessing. None of the states requesting supplies had any idea what their infections were at that point.
There was a news article here about the workers at funeral homes, especially the embalmers, who are getting sick from handling the remains of COVID + individuals because they can’t get enough PPE’s. It’s a bit perplexing in light of the Medscape article I posted above that reported the significant drop in transmissibility after day 5 of symptoms, but I guess a low risk is not no risk.
I can’t find numbers for North Korea on the NYtimes map tracker. It wouldn’t surprise me if North Korea did have a very successful response to COVID-19.
They’ll be arguing this for years. Too much in the way of consequence is going to cascade down from the policy actions and politicians get really motivated when it comes to avoiding blame.
.
Well, we likely agree China’s been lying through their teeth as to their number of deaths and - by extension - number of infected.
But think this through to the next steps, so he resigns… does that really help? Is NY’s second in command going to do better or will Cuomo learn from past mistakes and use that experience for good in the next few months? I don’t know, but at least he reversed the problem with the nursing home decree once it became obvious it was a problem. I’m not in NY and don’t follow NY politics, but as an outsider my guess is NY would be better off keeping someone who’s already up to speed as possible and learning all the time unless there’s more to the story. So far, the things we’re talking about are mistakes. Everybody is going to make them. So unless he’s willfully doing awful things (and it doesn’t appear he is), sometimes in a crisis it’s better to stick with the person who’s in place, has experience and making changes as s/he learns. None of the governors is going to emerge from this with a 100% record. They’ll all have dumb decisions of one sort or another.
China, being a one-party, very much state controlled system, has the capability to hide deaths/number of infected, besides efficiently making squeaky wheels… disappear.
If someone can describe how Florida, with a two-party system, an adversarial press, and no censorship on what that press reports, can do the same, I know I’ll find it eye-opening reading.
Perhaps they were concerned that it was unclear where the next outbreak would be, as little testing was done then, and given the lag in shipment, the supplies would always be following the last outbreak and not the current one. The plethora of PPE elsewhere may have prevented the rest of the country from suffering NY’s experience.
It might help to remember that at the beginning, no one knew nearly as much as we know now. Each day more is known. Some time ago someone mentioned this as being akin to the boy calling wolf. No, it’s not even close. The boy and everyone else knew what a wolf was and nothing was there. With this we just knew “something viral” was out there - definitely something, and something new to our planet. Even now there are still questions regarding who, why, and how folks get affected (or not).
Hindsight is great at finding errors. Dealing with something new going forward is infinitely more difficult.
Learn from mistakes. Learn from other’s mistakes. Except for those covering up the “known” (regardless of where it was done or who did it), grace needs to be given for mistakes made trying to do what was right (or give best advice). Not a single one of us is perfect nor would any of us have made all the right decisions given the same info at the time it was known. It’s called being human.
Then move on with advice based upon the current knowledge and be nice to your neighbor (using The Good Samaritan story to define “neighbor”). Someday you may need them to be nice to you.
From what I’m reading here it looks like your Governor did do some steps very early that helped stop the spread- telling nursing homes and hospitals to reuse PPE in February before this was even being talked about. Did he tell the public? Sound like no. Did he tell other governor’s and Americans in other states? No. Why not? A friend of his in power at the time was saying that there was no problem…it was all under control. So DeSantis quietly got his state prepared with policy and process for PPE and hygiene. Good for Florida, would have been nice for the rest of America . So I guess it’s not just the weather and outdoor lifestyle.
(remember, the federal government was telling us there were only a few cases and everything was under control in late Feb/early March)
Mid February:
"Three months ago, Floridians were celebrating Valentine’s Day unaware that the novel coronavirus posed any real threat to their lives, or that it was likely already spreading through the state. No one had told them to be worried.
While the public was kept in the dark, top Florida health officials were scrambling to come up with a plan for a crisis they knew was upon them, according to internal Florida Department of Health data and communications obtained by the Miami Herald. The records show that on Feb. 13 DOH assembled an emergency response team. The team’s mission: “Contain the spread of the virus.” It also began preparing for N95 mask shortages and privately providing pandemic protocols to long-term care facilities, warning them about the risks the virus posed to elderly residents.
By mid-February, Raul Pino, the recently appointed director of the Department of Health’s office in Orange County, was growing concerned about COVID-19 overwhelming his resources…"
They were monitoring and contact tracing ON THE SLY, in mid-February:
The state was also monitoring hundreds of people, far more than anyone outside state government knew at the time. DOH memos marked “confidential” show that by Feb. 18, more than 500 people in Florida had been flagged for monitoring for possible exposure and more than a dozen people had been tested (all with negative results) — figures the state refused to release, even to local hospitals and to state senators at a public hearing.
This handing out of PPE was happening at the beginning of March, when there were few tests and very little data on where the infections were. Just guesses at that point. If the handout of PPE had happened a month later, there would have been more data and different decisions would have been reasonable.
@suzyQ7
The Miami Herald is rightly scrutinizing their own state government. But surely, FL wasn’t the only state with the virus in mid Feb. Are you saying FL had unique insights and other states were clueless and needed FL to enlighten them?
…or that NY would have welcomed a call from DeSantis in which DeSantis gave advice… (I’m laughing really hard at the mental image of the NY leadership taking advice from the Florida morons.) Again, we have to work within the limits of what we know is reasonable and possible. NY and the media are nothing but contemptuous of anything that happens south of approximately DC. Even if DeSantis had something helpful to say, does anyone really think most of the other governors would have listened? Come on.
DeSantis wouldn’t know to call any other state (there were very few confirmed cases anywhere at that time, although we know it was running rampant in the northeast), but he should have been vocal in his OWN state and talked publically about the clear concerns of the his health department and what they were doing to prepare. Sharing concerns with his citizens and having them prepare. If the message to Floridians was - “this may be an issue and we are preparing for you by doing this, this and this”, it would have gotten picked up elsewhere. Instead the message at the federal level and in Florida was “everything is under control, nothing to worry about, no risk to the average American”. Clearly, they thought there was a risk but shut their mouths to not get on the bad side of Floridas most important state resident.