- Andrew Cuomo: Apex of coronavirus outbreak in NY two or three weeks away
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This report is the first to show the level of panic that was building within the New York Governor's office:
Cuomo, speaking at his daily COVD-19 briefing in Manhattan, said the state's projection models now suggest the apex of the coronavirus crisis could hit New York within 14 to 21 days, rather than the 45 days the state projected late last week.
He likened it to a "bullet train" headed for New York, urging the federal government to deploy as many ventilators and as much protective medical gear it can to the state as quickly as possible.
"Where are they?" Cuomo said. "Where are the ventilators? Where are the masks? Where are the gowns? Where are they?”
At this point, we should show what one of the more influential coronavirus models that Governor Cuomo was using looked like, which Political Calculations originally presented on 12 May 2020. The following chart is taken from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)'s 25 March 2020 projections showing its estimates of the minimum, likely, and maximum number of additional hospital beds that would be needed in the state of New York to care for the model's expected surge of coronavirus patients.
This is just one of several coronavirus models whose projections were being combined and presented to Governor Cuomo by consultants from McKinsey & Co., where the IHME's coronavirus model's projections for New York are consistent with the figures and timing of a peak cited by Governor Cuomo in the days preceding his panic.
Faced with what appeared to be an imminent shortage of hospital beds and other medical resources, the Cuomo administration appears to have adopted an emergency triage strategy, one that would have devastatingly deadly consequences. Here, to free up as many beds as possible in New York's near-capacity hospitals, the Cuomo administration would try to move as many patients infected with the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus as they could out of these facilities into others, even though they could still be contagious and present the risk of spreading infections within the facilities to which they would be transferred.
The facilities in which they would choose to place them were predominantly privately run nursing homes.
Note: This analysis was originally presented at Political Calculations on 12 May 2020.
