https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-with-covid-19
Cuomo, DeBlasio and bureaucrats come out as the villains in this piece. Trump, who's not mentioned, could have been the hero who saved the day if he'd banned flights from Europe the same time he banned flights from China.
Some excerpts -
“We want New Yorkers to go about their daily lives, ride the subway, take the bus, go see your neighbors,” New York City Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot said on March 2.
The mayor gave the same guidance. “From what we do understand, you cannot contract it through casual contact, so the subway is not the issue,” de Blasio said March 3. Days later, he said, “It has to go from someone who is infected to another person directly into their mouth, their nose, or their eyes.”
Health experts have now almost totally reversed that understanding. The CDC told people to begin wearing face coverings in public on April 3, at which point there were more than 5,000 new cases a day in New York. Later that month, the agency updated guidance to say that touching contaminated surfaces didn’t appear to be the primary mode of transmission. There have since been multiple case studies showing clusters of transmission in offices, at churches and other high-density setting
For all of New York City’s risk, its leaders moved late on shutting down the city.
Cuomo and de Blasio — who have had a long-running, often public feud — disagreed for days over how and when to act. The city closed the schools on March 15. Two days later, de Blasio raised the possibility of a stay-at-home order. Cuomo disagreed, saying it was the state’s decision and that he had “no interest whatsoever or plan whatsoever to contain New York City.” On March 20, he announced that the state would shut all non-essential businesses, and told people to stay home.
In hindsight, the city’s actions came late. The day the stay-at-home orders were announced, New York City reported 4,000 new cases — despite a significant shortage of testing. The outbreak was well into the acceleration phase. And with a bigger head-start, the virus kept growing in the city, with new cases peaking 17 days later on April 6.
As the virus swept through nursing homes — and the city was in an urgent search for hospital beds — the question arose of what to do with elderly patients who recovered.
On March 25, the state made what now appears to be an ill-fated decision to send those people back to nursing homes once they were well enough to leave the hospital. Two months later, Cuomo said the state had followed the federal government’s guidance, and made the rules when the state was scrambling for hospital bed space.
“Is the best use of a hospital bed to have somebody sit there for two weeks in the hospital bed when they don’t need the hospital bed, because they’re not urgently ill? Cuomo said at a press briefing on May 20. “They’re just waiting to test negative.”
Statewide, there have been 5,980 presumed and confirmed Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes and adult-care facilities as of May 24. New York has now changed its rules for sending patients back to the homes, saying hospitals can’t do so until a patient tests negative for the virus.
The article describes some of the characteristics that made NYC more problematic than other cities in the USA, like population density and reliance on the subway. But it doesn't touch on why Asian cities with similar characteristics fared hugely better than NYC. The difference IMHO, better government preparedness and response, and cultures more inclined to wear masks.