A long-awaited report commissioned by Gov. Kathy Hochul to analyze the “good, the bad (and) the ugly” of New York’s coronavirus response finds that state officials grappled with significant health infrastructure challenges even as they took significant steps to mitigate the spread of the virus.
The nearly 300-page report, released Friday by the Olson Group, cites a hospital system that had significantly reduced its bed capacity in the decades before the pandemic, along with nursing homes whose quality varied widely. At the same time, the report says New York’s mass COVID-19 vaccination effort was one of the state’s biggest successes.
The review also calls out then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s “top-down approach” to emergency management was a “significant and unnecessary mistake” that at times led to tensions with local officials and failed to leverage the expertise of state and local agencies. Reviewers found that local authorities often struggled to comply with Cuomo’s frequent executive orders as the pandemic persisted.
Still, the report’s assessment of Cuomo is not entirely negative. It credits him with taking decisive steps to try to control the virus early on, such as switching schools to remote learning and trying to keep the public informed through daily briefings, although the report says they eventually became excessive.
He also refrains from harshly criticizing Cuomo for his policy requiring nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients early in the pandemic, a matter currently being investigated by a congressional committee. While New York nursing home policies were “often rushed and uncoordinated,” they also reflected “the best understanding of the scientific community at the time they were published,” according to the report.
Cuomo led the pandemic response from the time the first COVID-19 cases were reported in New York in March 2020 until Hochul took office in August 2021, when he resigned amid a sexual harassment scandal.
Richard Azzopardi, a spokesman for the former governor, rejected the report’s criticism of Cuomo’s centralized approach to the pandemic in a statement Friday. “We are all experiencing this, and no rational person can believe that a coordinated, centralized response is inferior to decisions being made by a group of faceless bureaucrats,” he said.
Azzopardi also noted that Cuomo led the effort to coordinate COVID-19 care among the state’s 261 hospitals and procure personal protective equipment for New Yorkers. New York under Cuomo was able to “put together a state-level testing system that was able to do more than most individual countries in the world,” he said.
At an unrelated news conference Friday afternoon, Hochul said he had not yet reviewed the report, which the state paid the Olson Group $4.3 million to prepare and which was first announced in 2022. Hochul has previously criticized to the company for taking so long to publish it. the evaluation. But on Friday he said that, in the meantime, New York had made progress in its efforts to improve its emergency preparedness.
New York became one of the first epicenters of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. Despite extensive efforts to reduce the spread of the coronavirus, more than 83,000 New Yorkers have died from COVID-19 to date.
The report found that New Yorkers faced significant negative consequences from some of the measures taken to stop the spread of the virus, including business and school closures. He said the state was able to mitigate some of those effects and also offered recommendations for additional protections in the future.
For example, the report acknowledged that the state continued to provide free meals to students while they were learning remotely, but also noted that students experienced significant learning loss. The authors urged state officials to continue improving remote and hybrid learning capabilities and find ways to provide more equitable resources for students.
The report also found that the state attempted to help struggling businesses by giving them protections such as a moratorium on commercial evictions. But he suggested there could be similar protections in the future for homeowners who need to pay their mortgages.
