Andrew Cuomo Takes Charge
On March 1st, New York reported its first confirmed case of COVID-19, after a Manhattan health care worker in her late thirties, who had visited Iran, tested positive at a hospital in the city. Six days later, that number had jumped to 89, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency.
Two days later, Donald Trump tweeted, “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” As the country faces a national emergency that is graver, for most of us, than any in living memory, a surreal split-screen response has been unfolding in Washington and Albany, via Queens. The daily public briefings held by Cuomo, 62, the governor of the hardest-hit state, have become appointment viewing, not just for New Yorkers, but for all Americans feeling terrified, unmoored, and hungry for something resembling competent national leadership. For a politician never especially renowned for his bedside manner, Cuomo has emerged as an unlikely source of comfort in these supremely unsettling times, the blunt-talking adult in the room.
The debasement of standards in the Trump era has made even minimal gestures of statesmanship appear positively Churchillian, of course, and so the mere fact that Cuomo relies on data and scientific opinion and has the ability to display human empathy can feel disproportionately soothing. Though New York is unique among American cities in terms of population density and its status as an international travel hub — that, combined with a shambolic federal response, even after Trump declared the pandemic a national emergency, would have made any state- and city-level attempts at containment difficult — Cuomo’s decisions to close schools and issue a stay-at-home order came later than other states with less-significant outbreaks. Ohio, for example, closed its public schools three days before New York, despite having only five confirmed cases, and California’s shelter-in-place order came three days before New York’s, though New York had six times the number of confirmed cases.
But as a communicator, in particular, Cuomo has risen to the occasion, proving especially adept at walking viewers through the nuances of the daily barrage of bad news, offering realistic glimmers of hope but never magical thinking. He’s shared personal anecdotes about his family, including his younger brother, Chris, the CNN anchor, who has tested positive for the coronavirus, and displayed a surprising degree of warmth and humor for someone who acknowledged in his own memoir that the Albany media referred to him, alternately, as the Prince of Darkness and Darth Vader. “Andrew has always had these two sides,” says Michael Shnayerson, author of The Contender, a 2015 biography of Cuomo. “One is charming and comes out in a time of crisis — he was brilliant during Superstorm Sandy, racing around the city late at night, checking each hot spot and earning the acclaim of people on either side of the aisle — but this is also a governor known for being brutal with underlings and ruthless with his rivals.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/andrew-cuomo-new-york-coronavirus-982087/
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