A long-awaited report commissioned by Gov. Kathy Hochul to look at the “good, the bad [and] the ugly” of New York’s coronavirus response finds that state officials grappled with major health infrastructure challenges even as they took significant steps to mitigate the virus' spread.
The nearly 300-page report, released on Friday by the Olson Group, cites a hospital system that had significantly reduced its bed capacity in the decades leading up to the pandemic, along with nursing homes whose quality varied widely. At the same time, the report says New York's mass COVID-19 vaccination effort was one of the state's greatest successes.
The review also calls then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s “top-down approach” to emergency management a “significant and unnecessary mistake” that sometimes led to tensions with local officials and failed to take advantage of state and local agencies' expertise. The reviewers found that local authorities were often left scrambling to comply with Cuomo’s frequent executive orders as the pandemic persisted.
Still, the report’s assessment of Cuomo isn’t entirely negative. It gives him credit for taking decisive steps to try to control the virus early on, such as switching schools to remote learning, and trying to keep the public informed through daily briefings — although the report says these eventually became excessive.
It also refrains from leveling harsh criticism against Cuomo for his policy requiring nursing homes to accept patients with COVID-19 early in the pandemic — a matter that is currently under investigation by a congressional committee. While New York's nursing home policies were “frequently rushed and uncoordinated,” they also reflected “the best understanding of the scientific community at the time they were issued,” according to the report.
Cuomo led the pandemic response from the time the first COVID-19 cases were reported in New York in March 2020 until Hochul took over his post in August 2021, when he resigned amid a sexual harassment scandal.
Richard Azzopardi, a spokesperson for the former governor, pushed back on the report’s criticisms of Cuomo's centralized approach to the pandemic in a statement on Friday. “We all lived through this and no rational person can believe that a coordinated, centralized response is inferior to having decisions made by a gaggle of faceless bureaucrats,” he said.
Azzopardi also noted that Cuomo led the effort to coordinate COVID-19 care among the state’s 261 hospitals and procure personal protective equipment for New Yorkers. New York under Cuomo was able to “stand up a statewide testing system that was able to do more than most individual countries on the globe," he said.
At an unrelated press conference on Friday afternoon, Hochul said she had not yet reviewed the report, which the state paid the Olson Group $4.3 million to prepare and which was first announced in 2022. Hochul has previously criticized the company for taking so long to release the assessment. But on Friday, she said New York had moved forward with efforts to improve its emergency preparedness in the meantime.
New York became one of the early epicenters of the pandemic in spring 2020. Despite major efforts to reduce the spread of the coronavirus, more than 83,000 New Yorkers have died from COVID-19 to date.
The report found that New Yorkers faced significant negative consequences from some of the steps taken to stop the virus's spread, including shutting down businesses and schools. It said the state was able to mitigate some of those effects, and also offered recommendations for additional protections in the future.
For instance, the report acknowledged that the state continued to provide students with free meals while they were learning remotely, but it also noted students experienced significant learning loss. The authors urged state officials to keep improving remote and hybrid learning capabilities and find ways to provide more equitable resources for students.
The report also found that the state tried to help struggling businesses by providing protections such as a moratorium on commercial evictions. But it suggested that in the future, there could be similar protections for landlords who need to pay their mortgages.
