American Crisis by Andrew Cuomo

Author:Andrew Cuomo [Cuomo, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2020-10-13T00:00:00+00:00

MARCH 31 | 9,298 NEW CASES | 10,929 HOSPITALIZED | 332 DEATHS

“The main battle is at the apex; we’re still going up the mountain.”

WE WERE STILL TWO TO four weeks from the apex of this mountain we were climbing, and we were all tired. A month of bad news, our lifestyles disrupted, and nobody knew when it was going to get better, not even the president, who was harping on reopening the country by Easter, less than two weeks away.

The nation was realizing the disparity in the infection rate between lower-income communities and higher-income communities. Luckily, in New York the disparity was much less than other states across the nation. We were testing more people than any state in the country, even more per capita than China and South Korea. New York City had an infection rate of about 19 percent. The infection rate among the Black community and the Latino community was about 23 percent; in some states there was a nearly 50 percent differential. We wanted to ensure that every New Yorker was getting all the help they needed. We were increasing testing and services in Black and brown communities and made special efforts in public housing. Our greatest challenge was in New York City’s crowded public housing. In these areas special teams were going door to door to offer people testing and information on social distancing, masks, and precautions.

The high-infection areas were what we called hot-spot zip codes. The highest infection rate hot spots had an infection rate of approximately 50 percent. Corona, Queens, which is served by Elmhurst Hospital, was one of those hot spots. Elmhurst made national news when it was overwhelmed with patients and suffered a severe shortage of supplies. It was an eye-opener on several levels. Elmhurst is a community that comprises many new immigrants and low-income people. It is a community that did not have as much access to health care and had many underlying illnesses. It was also a community suffering from a housing shortage, with many new immigrants living in tight quarters.

Elmhurst is a public hospital as opposed to a private hospital. In downstate New York, there are approximately one hundred hospitals with about ninety “privately run” and eleven “public” hospitals operated by the City of New York. While we had understood that it would be a challenge to get the private hospitals to work together, we didn’t know that the eleven public hospitals, all owned by New York City, were not already coordinated as one system either. If Elmhurst was overwhelmed, why didn’t it coordinate with the other ten hospitals in the same system to shift patients, resources, and staff as necessary?

As usual when one deals with a bureaucracy, there were no good answers. Bureaucracy takes comfort in the status quo, relying on an almost arrogant belief that there is an inherent wisdom in the current system. It’s usually quite the opposite. For me, the health-care system was a single chain; if one link breaks anywhere in the system, the whole chain is broken.

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