New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo instructed the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City this week to figure out a way to disinfect the subways trains every 24 hours.
The news here is not so much the governor’s request but the fact that New York City was not already doing daily cleanings of the trains that shuttle millions of riders back and forth every day. It is additionally newsworthy that it took a request from the governor in late April for transportation officials even to consider coming up with a 24-hour strategy for disinfecting the city's sprawling germ tubes.
Considering that New York City is the epicenter of the coronavirus in the United States, where a total of 18,076 New Yorkers have already died from the disease, it is astonishing that city officials are only now thinking of ways to disinfect every day the trains that have been running all this time during the pandemic. It is even more astonishing when you consider Cuomo’s request comes weeks after an MIT working paper claimed the subways and buses were a “major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle” of the coronavirus in New York City.
"Any essential worker who shows up and gets on a train should know that the train was disinfected the night before,” the governor told reporters Wednesday, characterizing his request as "a tremendous undertaking that has never been done before.”
He added, “We don't want them to stay home. We owe it to them to be able to say, 'The train you ride, the bus you ride, has been disinfected and is clean.'"
City officials should have been on top of this in February. They would even be forgiven if they waited until March to get the trains disinfected every day. But to not take this obvious and reasonable step until after the governor asked for a plan in late April, several months into the viral pandemic? That is nuts.
Anecdotally speaking, many grocery stores in Washington adopted anti-viral strategies early on to reduce the risk of spreading the disease, including deploying teams of workers to parking lots to disinfect returned grocery carts, thus increasing the likelihood that customers will have a clean cart for shopping. Though disinfecting all New York subway trains every day is a far more difficult and complex undertaking, especially because the system is open 24 hours, it is still mind-boggling that city officials did not even think until this week to tackle an issue that grocery stores figured out months ago.
All that said, before you blame Cuomo for what seems like a glaring oversight, remember that the trains are the responsibility of the MTA and the mayor. But this is Mayor Bill de Blasio we are talking about. The man can barely be trusted to tie his own shoes, let alone oversee an undertaking as complicated as the one requested by Cuomo.
Also, some of this feels like a failure of the news industry, which has a major presence in New York City. Maybe if the New York-based reporters spent a little less time obsessing about Florida’s handling of the pandemic and a little more time investigating their own backyard, they would have noticed that their germ-infested subway trains were not being cleaned every day. Maybe they could have used that knowledge to pressure New York City's leadership into doing something about it well before April.
The MTA is expected to deliver a plan later today.
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