The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Blame New York

Posted on | July 22, 2020 | Comments Off on Blame New York

 

What counts as “success” in fighting a pandemic?

Last week, Dr. Anthony Fauci, made a controversial assessment of New York’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. “We know that, when you do it properly, you bring down those cases. We have done it. We have done it in New York,” he told PBS’s Judy Woodruff. “New York got hit worse than any place in the world. And they did it correctly.”
Fauci was thoroughly mocked for his praise of New York, and not just by me.
“New York did it right by forcing thousands of highly infectious patients into nursing homes and running the subways 24-7 with no cleaning and no masks for months,” said Phil Kerpen, the president of American Commitment and The Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
“These comments by Dr. Fauci are a slap in the face to the thousands of New Yorkers who suffered immensely due to the inept and fatal policy errors from Governor Andrew Cuomo,” said Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona.
“The media informs me repeatedly that Dr. Anthony Fauci has never been wrong about anything and is above criticism,” mocked Ben Domenech of The Federalist. “He just hailed New York for their response to coronavirus. Are we allowed to call out a degree of bulls**t that monumental?”

New York alone has more than one-fifth of all U.S. coronavirus deaths, and when you combine the tri-state area (New York, New Jersey and Connecticut), that’s more than 36% of U.S. deaths. Comparing the per-capita death rates, you find that Florida’s rate is 86% lower than New York, and the rate in Texas is 92% lower than New York.

Hey, did you know that The American Spectator still publishes a print magazine and that you can suscribe for $10.99 a month or $69.99 a year? I mention this because the most recent print edition includes my article about how badly Cuomo screwed up on COVID-19:

On March 2, the day after New York reported its first coronavirus case, Gov. Andrew Cuomo appeared on CNN, where he declared that he was “mobilizing the public health system to contain the spread.” In an interview with CNN’s John Berman, the Democratic governor said his state was “ramping up our testing capacity,” but assured viewers that “we have no reason for concern” that the COVID-19 patient, a 39-year-old woman who had just returned from Iran, had spread the virus to anyone else in New York. Cuomo added, “What I am concerned about, if anything, more than a health issue, is the perception issue and the fear issue. I understand diligence and I understand anxiety and let’s do everything we can. But you can’t allow the fear to outpace reality, right?”
The grim reality of New York’s coronavirus outbreak soon outpaced the worst fears anyone might have imagined in early March. By mid-April, Cuomo’s state was reporting as many as a thousand deaths a day, mostly in New York City and its suburbs, with the city’s pandemic also driving up the death tolls in neighboring New Jersey and Connecticut. By late May, those three states accounted for 45 percent of all U.S. coronavirus deaths. . . .

Read the whole thing. The time-lag in print publication meant that the statistical comparisons were based on data from late May and June, but even with the recent “second wave” surge in other states, New York has still not lost its place atop the coronavirus death totals.




 

Category: Health Care, New York

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