NY Gov. Cuomo: Not Sure Keeping Everyone Home Is the ‘Best Public Health Strategy’
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo speaks during a news conference alongside the National Guard at the Jacob Javits Center that will house a temporary hospital in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, Monday, March 23, 2020, in New York. New York City hospitals are just 10 days from running out of “really basic supplies,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said late Sunday. De Blasio has called upon the federal government to boost the city’s quickly dwindling supply of protective equipment. The city also faces a potentially deadly dearth of ventilators to treat those infected by the coronavirus. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
When President Donald Trump spoke about the potential of anti-malarial drugs, some in media were all over him for allegedly giving “false hope.” But when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, spoke of the same thing even spoke of how New York was going to be conducting trials with the drugs, there was no such criticism, indeed they described his briefings as “presidential.”
The president said that there would be a reevaluation of some of the restrictions placed on people at the end of the month as to what they might be able to do. He indicated that he was hopeful for people to get back to work and normal things soon and get the economy back on track, and although he did not set a deadline, he said he was hopeful, “I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” April 12.
Media criticized that immediately, suggesting that he didn’t care about people being exposed, without seeming to understand that it’s a balancing act, that it’s also vitally important to the health of people to have their jobs and to be able to feed their families, that if you destroy the economy, you harm a lot of Americans along with it.
Now, Governor Cuomo is expressing some of the same concerns that the president has.
Cuomo said his stay at home order for all of New York was “probably not the best public health strategy,” according to Fox.
“If you rethought that or had time to analyze that public health strategy, I don’t know that you would say quarantine everyone,” Cuomo said during a press conference in Albany. “I don’t even know that that was the best public health policy. Young people then quarantined with older people was probably not the best public health strategy because the younger people could have been exposing the older people to an infection. “Cuomo said the smartest way forward would be a public health strategy that complemented a “get-back-to-work strategy.”“What we did was we closed everything down. That was our public health strategy. Just close everything, all businesses, old workers, young people, old people, short people, tall people,” said Cuomo. “Every school closed, everything.”Cuomo stressed the need for both public health and economic growth. “We have to do both,” said the governor. “We’re working on it.”
He said the 3.3 million who filed for unemployment was also a “terrible, frightening feeling for everyone.”
Gee, that sounds an awful lot like Trump’s ‘you can’t have the cure be worse than the virus’ point.
So will the media be calling Cuomo out for being too hopeful? Or wanting to kill people because he’s also concerned about harming people because of the economy?
Cuomo also squelched another story: that there aren’t enough personal protective equipment at present in New York hospitals.
“We have enough PPE in stock for the immediate need, not past it, but for the immediate need.” He added that he was dealing with hospitals who have a need for PPE “today and tomorrow, that’s the kind of time frame we’re dealing with.”
He also noted good news: that although the cases were still rising in New York, the rate of growth had slowed which may be a positive indication they could be close to flattening the curve.
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