WSJ report: New York's coronavirus response made pandemic worse

[rogue06]

As in the headlines below?

Andrew Cuomo is no hero. He's to blame for New York's coronavirus catastrophe

Why oh why is NY Governor Andrew Cuomo being praised for his coronavirus response?

Seems Rogue is running with some rather old "news" in this thread.

Funny how you had to turn to Europe in order to get some stories about this -- and the latter in the form of an opinion piece and not a news story.

ETA: And even so they were relatively late to the party, writing about it near the end of May when most of it was known since April.


Fail better.

[rogue06]

So, even you can get tired of whataboutism.

Btw, now is yet another opportunity to criticize someone for "whataboutism" as seen in the first sentences in the post directly below yours.

But you won't.

You have never, not even once, criticized a liberal for doing it although you pretend that it really bothers you.

So go ahead. Try it for once. Or will you remain a blatant hypocrite who's only standard is a double one?

[mikewhitney]

I am hoping the issues remain focused on the dynamics of New York governance. Unfortunately, Cuomo's incompetance will be used as a basis to transfer reliance on federal incompetance to run the medical system.

[Charles]

Funny how you had to turn to Europe in order to get some stories about this -- and the latter in the form of an opinion piece and not a news story.

ETA: And even so they were relatively late to the party, writing about it near the end of May when most of it was known since April.


Fail better.

Because USA Today is Europe? Glenn Harlan Reynolds who wrote the opinion piece is Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee. Since when was that Europe?

The two writers from The Guardian are Americans as well.

It is always funny when people make such basic errors and then end it all with a "Fail better".

[Charles]

Btw, now is yet another opportunity to criticize someone for "whataboutism" as seen in the first sentences in the post directly below yours.

But you won't.

You have never, not even once, criticized a liberal for doing it although you pretend that it really bothers you.

So go ahead. Try it for once. Or will you remain a blatant hypocrite who's only standard is a double one?

You are the one who holds the double standard. You talk about Trump in the opening post, taking blame away from him, and we are not even allowed to share our opinion on that. However, you had no problem when MM talked about the President in this thread, because there was no criticism.

If you would want to be consistent, I would be happy to help.

[oxmixmudd]

According to data provided by Johns Hopkins and reported in the Wall Street Journal 30,500 people have died of the Chicom coronavirus which accounts for roughly 7% of the world’s death toll and 27% of the U.S. mortality rate -- and much of it was the result of ineptness of leadership in the state as well as in New York City.

Source: How New York’s Coronavirus Response Made the Pandemic Worse

New York leaders faced an unanticipated crisis as the new coronavirus overwhelmed the nation’s largest city. Their response was marred by missed warning signs and policies that many health-care workers say put residents at greater risk and led to unnecessary deaths.

In the first few days of March, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio assured New Yorkers things were under control. On March 2, Mr. de Blasio tweeted that people should go see a movie.

Only after the disease had gripped the city’s low-income neighborhoods in early March did Gov. Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio mobilize public and private hospitals to create more beds and intensive-care units. The hasty expansion that ensued, led by New York government leaders and hospital administrators, produced mistakes that helped worsen the crisis, health-care workers say.

The virus has hit New York harder than any other state, cutting through its densely populated urban neighborhoods and devastating the economy. New York state’s death toll of 30,575 accounted for 7% of the world’s deaths and 27% of American deaths as of June 11, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

The Wall Street Journal talked to nearly 90 front-line doctors, nurses, health-care workers, hospital administrators and government officials, and reviewed emails, legal documents and memos, to analyze what went wrong. Among the missteps they identify:

• Improper patient transfers. Some patients were too sick to have been transferred between hospitals. Squabbling between the Cuomo and de Blasio administrations contributed to an uncoordinated effort.
  
• Insufficient isolation protocols. Hospitals often mixed infected patients with the uninfected early on, and the virus spread to non-Covid-19 units.
  
• Inadequate staff planning. Hospitals added hundreds of intensive-care beds but not always enough trained staff, leading to improper treatments and overlooked patients dying alone.
  
• Mixed messages. State, city government and hospital officials kept shifting guidelines about when exposed and ill front-line workers should return to work.
  
• Overreliance on government sources for key equipment. Hospitals turned to the state and federal government for hundreds of ventilators, but many were faulty or inadequate.
  
• Procurement-planning gaps. While leaders focused attention on procuring ventilators, hospitals didn’t always provide for adequate supplies of critical resources including oxygen, vital-signs monitors and dialysis machines.
  
• Incomplete staff-protection policies. Many hospitals provided staff with insufficient protective equipment and testing.

Source

© Copyright Original Source

I wonder if reports like this is the reason why stories about Andrew Cuomo (who the MSM fell over themselves trying to top one another with stories about how great he was doing back then) riding in and saving the Democrats by being their presidential nominee have dried up.

Anywho...

Source: Ibid

One planning lapse showed up in improper patient transfers. More than 1,600 largely Covid-19 patients in two of the state’s largest hospital systems were moved from overloaded hospitals to ones less hit, according to spokespeople for those systems. Some patients arrived in worse condition than when they left, sometimes without names and treatment information, said doctors and nurses at several hospitals.

Under normal protocol, only stable patients typically would be transferred, but these people came in with “one foot in the grave,” said Dr. David Buziashvili, who worked many shifts at Bellevue hospital, part of the city’s public system, NYC Health + Hospitals. On one shift there, he was alarmed to see 10 new transfers in beds with little medical information, he said. “That is not how it should be done, and it is not safe for the patient at all.”

A Health + Hospitals spokeswoman, Stephanie Guzmán, said the city’s 11-facility hospital system provided “the highest quality care to all New Yorkers.” Only the least-sick patients were transferred between hospitals and their personal information was in a centralized system, she said.

Avery Cohen, a City Hall spokeswoman, blamed the state for denying a request from the city to establish a centralized hub, called a Healthcare Evacuation Call Center, that would have helped better coordinate transfers between hospitals, whether they were private or public. “We were grasping for every tool at our disposal to save as many lives as possible.” Ms. Cohen said. “The state was not interested.”

Dani Lever, a spokeswoman for the governor, said that system wasn’t designed for individual patient transfers. She said a state transfer system was created in late March after hundreds of open beds near harder-hit New York City hospitals had gone unnoticed

© Copyright Original Source

How does something like hundreds of empty beds go unnoticed?

Any how, skipping ahead...

Source: Ibid

The impact was made worse because the city went into the pandemic less prepared than it could have been. The city hospital system has long been considered underfunded. Private hospitals in the outer boroughs, particularly Queens, had closed over the years. New York hospitals had long ignored alarms raised by the nurses’ union and respiratory therapists about insufficient staffing levels, according to nurses and respiratory therapists at several city hospitals.

A contributing factor was New York leaders’ delayed reaction. Early signs of the virus’s arrival—including a rise in patients with flulike symptoms visiting hospitals—went largely uninvestigated by hospital, state and city officials. The city health department was limiting testing primarily to travelers from China, following the federal government’s lead. Throughout February in calls with hospitals, the city health department played down the possibility that the virus could spread through the air or by asymptomatic people.

...

While leaders in states like California and Ohio acted quickly to contain the spread, Messrs. Cuomo and de Blasio delayed taking measures to close the state and city even as the number of cases swelled, despite warnings from doctors, nurses and schoolteachers. California issued a statewide lockdown with 1,005 cases as of March 19, while New York remained open with 5,704 cases, according to updated Johns Hopkins data.

Even after New York announced its first coronavirus case on March 1, the city health department was advising New Yorkers they were more likely to get the flu. “I speak for the mayor also on this one—we think we have the best health-care system on the planet,” Mr. Cuomo said at a March 2 news conference.

Five days later, Mr. Cuomo declared a state of emergency, but medical and emergency-response experts worried the city and state administrations still weren’t taking matters seriously enough.

© Copyright Original Source

Keep in mind it wasn't until May that it dawned on Democrat leaders that sanitizing subway cars on a daily basis might be a good idea.

The article is long and detailed with numerous hyperlinks and graphs but is behind the New York Times paywall (easy to by-pass but I'm not going to say how).

They point out the delay in issuing lock-down orders (California enforced a statewide lock-down with just over 1000 cases on March 19, whereas New York still remained open with nearly 6000 cases until March 22) and de Blasio was actually still encouraging folks to go to the movies in March

One incredible foul up was that NYC allowed health care workers who tested positive to continue working blatantly ignoring CDC guidelines which caused God only knows how many people to get the disease.

That was almost as bad as Cuomo ordering nursing homes -- full of those most vulnerable to the Chicom coronavirus -- to take in infected patients leading to thousands of deaths. He threatened to close them down if they refused and then told them they were even forbidden to test new arriving patients for the disease.

Last I heard fatalities from the Chicom coronavirus in the state's nursing homes accounted for around 20% of the total death count.

Of course Cuomo tried to shift the blame saying he was merely following the guidelines provided by "Trump's CDC."

So, naturally, it was Trump's fault.

Of course it was quickly pointed out that the CDC guidelines do NOT instruct anyone to deliberately move potentially Chicom corona virus infected patients into nursing homes. Rather it said that if forced to take such measures you first need to be sure that the facilities were able to designate a section devoted to quarantining new patients for two weeks before allowing them in with the uninfected patients. Very few of these facilities were able to provide this but Cuomo still forced them to take in patients anyway.

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Anyway, the point of the article is that the list of New York's government screw ups is long and in many cases easily prevented if they had listened or simply used common sense.

There is nothing but hypocrisy here. Cuomo had to fight Trump and republicans every step of the way to do what he was able to do. Could he have done better - probably. New York was the first and most severe outbreak. But had Cuomo done what Trump and the right wanted done, it would have been 10x worse.

Rogue - you should be ashamed or yourself. You are one of the worst here fighting science and 'common sense' wrt the virus. If you had been Cuomo and dealt with the virus according the rantings of this president or the news sources you lean on, New York would have 300,000 dead, not 30,000.

[rogue06]

Because USA Today is Europe?

Look at your url. It is the European edition: http://eu.usatoday... the eu is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the European Union (EU)

Does it really matter where the authors are from?

And you didn't address why it took them over a month for them to catch up.

[rogue06]

There is nothing but hypocrisy here. Cuomo had to fight Trump and republicans every step of the way to do what he was able to do. Could he have done better - probably. New York was the first and most severe outbreak. But had Cuomo done what Trump and the right wanted done, it would have been 10x worse.

Rogue - you should be ashamed or yourself. You are one of the worst here fighting science and 'common sense' wrt the virus. If you had been Cuomo and dealt with the virus according the rantings of this president or the news sources you lean on, New York would have 300,000 dead, not 30,000.

I've asked that this not be turned into a TDS rant thread, but I'll address this.

Cuomo's fighting with the federal government was largely due to the state's unpreparedness and demanding that they get all the resources with everyone else be damned. This was what led to all those stories about how various states were fighting with one another over resources. And keep in mind, as the WSJ article notes, that right up to the last moment Cuomo was repeatedly assuring New Yorkers that they had more than enough PPE equipment.

And did New York need them or did they want to horde them? Remember how Trump sent the hospital ship to New York back in March? When it left it had been virtually unused. The same with those emergency field hospitals that were built.

And the article notes that Trump was correct about something the left virtually crucified him for

In mid-April, after hearing from distressed front-line workers, state officials realized some hospital supervisors and administrations were holding on to masks even when there were enough to go around, a state official said.

[Charles]

Look at your url. It is the European edition: http://eu.usatoday... the eu is the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the European Union (EU)

Does it really matter where the authors are from?

And you didn't address why it took them over a month for them to catch up.

I know it's the European edition. There is not much difference and it was published on the American version as well: https://web.archive.org/web/20200615...mn/5220164002/

But good try, Rogue...

And with regard to whether it matters where the authors are from.... You tried to make the point that I had to turn to Europe.... Which, obviously, was not the case...

The publishing date was not important with regard to the point I made. And neither does it seem to concern you a lot. Look at the sources in your opening post and see the date: June 11, 2020. It makes no difference to the point made.

[oxmixmudd]

I've asked that this not be turned into a TDS rant thread, but I'll address this.

Cuomo's fighting with the federal government was largely due to the state's unpreparedness and demanding that they get all the resources with everyone else be damned. This was what led to all those stories about how various states were fighting with one another over resources. And keep in mind, as the WSJ article notes, that right up to the last moment Cuomo was repeatedly assuring New Yorkers that they had more than enough PPE equipment.

And did New York need them or did they want to horde them? Remember how Trump sent the hospital ship to New York back in March? When it left it had been virtually unused. The same with those emergency field hospitals that were built.

And the article notes that Trump was correct about something the left virtually crucified him for

In mid-April, after hearing from distressed front-line workers, state officials realized some hospital supervisors and administrations were holding on to masks even when there were enough to go around, a state official said.

they didnt ultimately need those extra resources because social distancing worked. When they were requested the trends and the associated lead times for getting the resources demanded they be requested before the effect of social distancing could be measured. Before the trends had clearly turned. This is a report made after the fact using knowledge not available or clarified from guess to fact. It is useful for future planning in future outbreaks or future pandemics.

It is unconscionable to use it as a bludgeoning tool as you are in this thread.

[rogue06]

I know it's the European edition. There is not much difference and it was published on the American version as well: https://web.archive.org/web/20200615...mn/5220164002/

But good try, Rogue...

And with regard to whether it matters where the authors are from.... You tried to make the point that I had to turn to Europe.... Which, obviously, was not the case...

The publishing date was not important with regard to the point I made. And neither does it seem to concern you a lot. Look at the sources in your opening post and see the date: June 11, 2020. It makes no difference to the point made.

If it was the same as the U.S. edition then you still have to deal with why they were so late to the party. Cuomo had been facing criticism for his bungling since mid April or even earlier but the MSM were grimly determined to tout his marvelous handling of the pandemic (which we now know was unmitigated bovine scat).

Moreover, the single source here in the U.S. you managed to dredge up, aside from taking one and a half to two months to join in, didn't even do a news story on it. It was an opinion piece from outside. Something that could be dismissed as a RWNJ's opinion and nothing more by those who constantly engage in such things (sound familiar?).

While the WSJ piece was from the same time it was a long in depth analysis NEWS piece. Those things generally take awhile to put together and typically come out later.

[rogue06]

they didnt ultimately need those extra resources because social distancing worked. When they were requested the trends and the associated lead times for getting the resources demanded they be requested before the effect of social distancing could be measured. Before the trends had clearly turned. This is a report made after the fact using knowledge not available or clarified from guess to fact. It is useful for future planning in future outbreaks or future pandemics.

It is unconscionable to use it as a bludgeoning tool as you are in this thread.

This reads like something you had prepared in advance and posted without bothering to read my response since it fails to address a single point I raised.

[Charles]

If it was the same as the U.S. edition then you still have to deal with why they were so late to the party. Cuomo had been facing criticism for his bungling since mid April or even earlier but the MSM were grimly determined to tout his marvelous handling of the pandemic (which we now know was unmitigated bovine scat).

Moreover, the single source here in the U.S. you managed to dredge up, aside from taking one and a half to two months to join in, didn't even do a news story on it. It was an opinion piece from outside. Something that could be dismissed as a RWNJ's opinion and nothing more by those who constantly engage in such things (sound familiar?).

While the WSJ piece was from the same time it was a long in depth analysis NEWS piece. Those things generally take awhile to put together and typically come out later.

The first claim was Cuomu disappeared from headlines. I showed that to be wrong.

Next claim was that I had to look to Europe to find such headlines. That was also shown to be wrong.

Now you desperately want to make it a problem they were published too late. It's completely beside the point and desperate since your own source was even later.

But you gave it a try.

[Thoughtful Monk]

There was a snippet of a Gov. Cuomo interview on the local news tonight. He boasting about NY's low transmission rate and how NY is reopening smartly.

I hope he's right.

I fear that since there hasn't been quite enough time since all the BLM protests and the stage 3 openings, that he is celebrating too soon.

[rogue06]

It looks like the number of those needlessly killed in New York nursing homes by the Chicom coronavirus thanks to Andrew Cuomo's policies may be a lot higher than we previously thought.

From the Associated Press (AP):

Source: New York’s true nursing home death toll cloaked in secrecy

Riverdale Nursing Home in the Bronx appears, on paper, to have escaped the worst of the coronavirus pandemic, with an official state count of just four deaths in its 146-bed facility.

The truth, according to the home, is far worse: 21 dead, most transported to hospitals before they succumbed.

“It was a cascading effect,” administrator Emil Fuzayov recalled. “One after the other.”

New York’s coronavirus death toll in nursing homes, already among the highest in the nation, could actually be a significant undercount. Unlike every other state with major outbreaks, New York only counts residents who died on nursing home property and not those who were transported to hospitals and died there.

That statistic could add thousands to the state’s official care home death toll of just over 6,600. But so far the administration of Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has refused to divulge the number, leading to speculation the state is manipulating the figures to make it appear it is doing better than other states and to make a tragic situation less dire.

“That’s a problem, bro,” state Sen. Gustavo Rivera, a Democrat, told New York Health Commissioner Howard Zucker during a legislative hearing on nursing homes earlier this month. “It seems, sir, that in this case you are choosing to define it differently so that you can look better.”

How big a difference could it make? Since May, federal regulators have required nursing homes to submit data on coronavirus deaths each week, whether or not residents died in the facility or at a hospital. Because the requirement came after the height of New York’s outbreak, the available data is relatively small. According to the federal data, roughly a fifth of the state’s homes reported resident deaths from early June to mid July — a tally of 323 dead, 65 percent higher than the state’s count of 195 during that time period.

Even if half that undercount had held true from the start of the pandemic, that would translate into thousands more nursing home resident deaths than the state has acknowledged.

Another group of numbers also suggests an undercount. State health department surveys show 21,000 nursing home beds are lying empty this year, 13,000 more than expected — an increase of almost double the official state nursing home death tally. While some of that increase can be attributed to fewer new admissions and people pulling their loved ones out, it suggests that many others who aren’t there anymore died.




Source

© Copyright Original Source

The article continues on for awhile examining some of the defenses offered by Cuomo and demolishing them piecemeal.



I should also note that the WSJ article cited in the OP apparently missed one thing that Cuomo did that exacerbated the situation but that NBC Evening News mentioned in their broadcast from May 10th -- namely that he had also refused to give those facilities personal protective equipment (PPE) after forcing them to take in Chicom coronavirus-positive patients.