Confused guidance by public officials, unheeded warnings, delayed decisions and political infighting hampered initial efforts to control the COVID-19 outbreak in New York, the epicenter of the pandemic in the US, a report in The New York Times (NYT) said.
An investigation by the NYT found that New York State and City's own initial efforts failed to keep pace with the outbreak and implementing social-distancing measures much earlier could have reduced the state's death toll by 50 to 80 per cent.
Within a month of the first coronavirus detection in the city, New York is battling a tsunami of COVID-19 cases, with more than 140,000 people infected so far and over 5,500 deaths.
Experts now say that if the state and city had adopted widespread social-distancing measures a week or two earlier than they actually did, including closing schools, stores and restaurants, then the estimated death toll from the outbreak might have been reduced by 50 to 80 percent.
The first coronavirus case in the city emerged on March 1, a 39-year-old woman who returned to New York from Iran, where the pandemic was already simmering.
For many days after the first positive test, as the coronavirus silently spread throughout the New York region, the report said New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and City Mayor Bill de Blasio and their top aides projected an unswerving confidence that the outbreak would be readily contained.
They pointed out that while there would be cases, they sought to assure that New York's hospitals were some of the best in the world and plans were in place.
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Responses had been rehearsed during 'tabletop' exercises. After all, the city had been here before Ebola, Zika, the H1N1 virus, even September 11, the NYT report said.
Even so, the initial efforts by New York officials to stem the outbreak were hampered by their own confused guidance, unheeded warnings, delayed decisions and political infighting, The New York Times found in the investigation.
Officials seemed to speak and act based on the assumption that the virus had not arrived in the state until that first case the woman travelling from Iran. State and local officials now acknowledge that the virus was almost certainly in New York much earlier, the report said.
The NYT report added that from the earliest days of the crisis, state and city officials were also hampered by a chaotic and often dysfunctional federal response, including significant problems with the expansion of coronavirus testing, which made it far harder to gauge the scope of the outbreak.
Normally, New York would get help from Washington in such a time, as it did after the September 11 attacks but President Donald Trump through at least early March minimised the coronavirus threat, clashing with his own medical experts and failing to marshal the might of the federal government soon after cases emerged in the United States.
This led to state and city officials making decisions early on without full assistance from the federal government.
Flu was coming down, and then you saw this new ominous spike. And it was COVID. And it was spreading widely in New York City before anyone knew it, former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and former commissioner of the city's Health Department Thomas Frieden said in the NYT report.
You have to move really fast. Hours and days. Not weeks. Once it gets a head of steam, there is no way to stop it, Frieden said.
He said that if the state and city had adopted widespread social-distancing measures a week or two earlier, including closing schools, stores and restaurants, then the estimated death toll from the outbreak might have been reduced by 50 to 80 percent.
But New York was slow to mandate those measures, doing so only after localities in states including California and Washington had done so. San Francisco closed schools on March 12 when that city had 18 confirmed cases; Ohio closed its schools the same day, with five confirmed cases. New York closed schools three days later when the city had 329 cases.
Seven Bay Area counties imposed stay-at-home rules on March 17. Two days later, the entire state of California ordered the same. New York State's stay-at-home order came on the 20th, and went into effect on March 22.
New York City and the surrounding suburbs have now become the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, with far more cases than what even many countries have reported.
New York City as a whole was late in social measures, former New York City deputy health commissioner Isaac B. Weisfuse said.
Any after-action review of the pandemic in New York City will focus on that issue. It has become the major issue in the transmission of the virus.
While New York City Mayor Bill de Blasi said in the initial days that the city can really keep this thing contained, Cuomo said we have been ahead of this from Day 1.
Hospitals also expressed confidence in their plans for responding to a pandemic, with the Healthcare Association of New York State declaring on March 2 that its members were prepared for an influx of patients caused by Covid-19.
The NYT report said few, if any, appeared to have made significant efforts before the virus hit to greatly increase supplies of ventilators or protective gear, looking instead to draw on emergency government stockpiles.
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