Why New York’s liquor stores and dry cleaners stayed open at COVID-19′s peak: Andrew Cuomo explains pandemic policies in ‘American Crisis’
Andrew Cuomo’s grandfather had an expression: “When you don’t know what you’re talking about, it always seems simple.”
Gov. Cuomo wants to show you that it’s not simple to direct the state’s fight against a pandemic that has so far killed more than 34,000 New Yorkers and put the rest of us in face masks.
His new book, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic, talks some about the “Love Guv” persona he displayed in his televised daily coronavirus briefings at the height of the crisis. But mostly, it’s about policy, which Cuomo explains in an easy-to-understand way.
“Never in modern history has government ordered businesses, schools and private institutions to close. State government has never issued stay-at-home orders, not even during the 1918 flu pandemic, when schools and theaters were allowed to stay open,” he writes.
“Closing down is not a press release; it’s the most complex government policy we have ever instituted.”
Before New York’s lockdown order took effect March 22, Cuomo had to decide which businesses to close.
“I was inclined to close as near to everything as possible, because every person who had to go to work was putting their life at risk and I wasn’t going to ask that of one more worker than I absolutely had to.”
Food stores, health care facilities, drug stores and “supply chain industries” were essential. They would stay open. “That was easy.”
One of Cuomo’s aides suggested dry cleaners should stay open too.
“I thought he was crazy. There’s nothing essential about dry cleaning,” Cuomo writes.
His aide argued: “Police and other uniformed personnel need dry cleaners for their uniforms.”
So dry cleaners stayed open. So did mobile phone stores, because people need their phones.
“I objected to liquor stores staying open, but I was overruled, the argument being we had to be consistent about food and beverage businesses,” Cuomo writes. “If you could sell beer at a convenience store, then liquor stores should be allowed to stay open.”
For the same reason, he said, restaurants were allowed to sell takeout alcoholic beverages, “which had the added advantage of making people a little happier being stuck at home.”
Multiple choice quiz:
“If the governor concludes that in the middle of a pandemic safety dictates he must close the schools, who does the most pivotal conversation include?”
Your choices: The local politician; the local teachers' union head; the local PTA; the local health commissioner; the local school board, or the local hospital staff.
Cuomo’s answer: Local hospital staff.
“[W]ill the hospital staff show up for work if their children are at home?” he writes. "All other issues involve levels of political opposition, but the availability of hospital staff means life or death …
“The majority of health-care workers are in working families without significant resources. Many earn near-minimum wage salaries. Nurses are often mothers who are also working to manage households.” Closing schools, where these workers' children spend most of their days, “would be creating unprecedented demand on the local health care system.”
Cuomo deals head on with one of the most politically controversial facets of the pandemic, which was the deaths of thousands of people in nursing homes.
His response goes to the heart of his grandfather’s maxim that things seem simple when you don’t know what you are talking about.
“It was true,” Cuomo writes of reports of thousands of nursing home deaths.
But the details go beyond the political rhetoric.
Cuomo says that federal government “guidance” was that "a nursing home should continue to accept patients from hospitals where COVID-19 was present, and not discriminate against a COVID-positive person.
“The state followed the guidance, stating that nursing homes should not reject a patient ‘solely on the basis’ of COVID status,” he writes. “It also applied to hospitals. We couldn’t have a situation in which elderly patients who had been treated in hospitals ended up on the street because their nursing homes refused to take them back. Nor could we have a situation where hospitals refused to take a COVID-positive person.”
A complication: While the federal government barred homes from refusing patients only because they had COVID, New York law “is clear that a nursing home can ‘only accept’ a patient that it is prepared to treat given the needs of the other patients in its facility.”
In other words, if nursing homes were unable to treat COVID patients because they had no way of safely separating them from other patients, they did not have to accept them, Cuomo says.
The rules in any case proved irrelevant. The state never needed the nursing homes' help in handling COVID patients, Cuomo says. “As it turned out, our successful efforts to reduce the viral transmission rate and create additional [hospital] beds meant we were never in that dire situation,” he writes.
A state Department of Health study issued July 6 found that when the virus did get into nursing homes, it came from workers who showed no symptoms of the illness. “The rate of infection and deaths in nursing homes correlated with that of the broader regional community — a phenomenon that played out in every single state across the country and in nations around the world,” Cuomo says.
Facts and studies didn’t stop the critics. Republicans used nursing home deaths against governors in Democratic states plagued by COVID-19 in the pandemic’s early stages.
“Republicans needed an offense to distract from the narrative of their botched federal response — and they needed it badly,” he says. He notes that Democratic governors Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Gavin Newsom in California and Tom Wolf in Pennsylvania all endured the GOP criticism he did about nursing home deaths. He also points out that Republican governor Ron DeSantis of Florida largely escape conservative criticism for a rise in nursing home deaths in his state.
Cuomo has nearly zero use for President Trump and his response to the pandemic. Throughout the book, he scores Trump and his administration for mishandling the situation.
He made nice where he could if he needed Trump’s approval for something, and he gives Trump’s son-in-law and White House aide Jared Kushner props for getting New York ventilators, personal protective equipment and military help when appeals to federal agencies failed. “He was attentive and he delivered,” Cuomo says of Kushner.
But Trump’s government failed Americans at every turn, he argues.
“Trump’s theory was to deny the existence of the virus and, when that didn’t work, act as if it were irrelevant and reopen the economy immediately,” Cuomo writes. “Our theory was that a virus requires a science-based solution and that a phased, data-driven reopening was smarter and better in the long term.”
Cuomo says the federal government didn’t even know the virus had arrived in New York for months.
“The consequences of that blunder cannot be underestimated … You can count the consequences in number of lives lost and billions spent. You can count it in the number of unemployed Americans and bankruptcy claims. For New York State it was particularly devastating.”
Cuomo isn’t shy about telling his own story of hard work as the pandemic peaked last spring — but he says the real credit for curbing the state’s COVID-19 deaths belongs to “the working families of New York.”
“When we were in our moment of need, we called on the blue-collar New Yorkers to show up for everyone. We needed them to come to work and risk their health so that so many of us could stay safely at home …. They had no obligation to risk their health and the health of their families. But they did it simply because ‘it was the right thing to do.’ But for some that is enough. For some that is everything.”
