Hacker News Reader

> They should have all known.

Before Washington state we had the clear data from the elderly homes in Bergamo Italy where they made the exact same mistake over a month earlier with catastrophic results. Before that we knew from the Wuhan data that CV19 is a highly asymmetric threat and it was critical to protect elderly and immuno-compromised.

The history is still to be written but the U.S. policy choice to go with broad lockdowns of everyone instead of the "focused protection" plan may go down as the worst public health error of modern times. Since they were hit hard and first, Hubei Province and Northern Italy at least have the excuse of no priors. By the time NY got hit any serious analyst knew and many were recommending circling the wagons around the vulnerable.

I have no idea if fault lies with Cuomo personally or someone he delegated this to, but someone in NY seriously fucked up. Hell, in Bergamo prosecutors filed charges against some city/regional administrators for negligent manslaughter (or similar).

Who did it right? Ron DeSantis did. He did the focused protection.

Yes, Florida focused their resources on protecting their elderly population and didn't implement broad lockdowns of people who weren't sick or at-risk. Their per-capita results are better than NY, CA and many other states.

Sweden also deserves credit for getting the public health policy right. They had the right plan but have admitted they could have done better in some of the early execution phase around protecting elder facilities. 7

Tried and true method we learned over time. The leaders that were strong enough to respond properly should be congratulated. This was a gigantic shot to the foot by our public health leadership, most state and federal leaders, and fawning media. And it's not even close to over.

Like Newsom who gave the biggest non-apology I've seen about getting caught violating his own COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, and then said the recall against him was being orchestrated by white supremacist antisemites (nazis) which is over 1.5 million people in his own state... I'm sure Cuomo will find something similar to say.

i'm ready to impeach newsom, but polling seems to suggests it's unlikely. i'd happily sign a petition to impeach LA mayor garcetti as well, if any were organized to do so. the pandemic response here was beyond stupidly awful--a combination of what-if based fearmongering and a frenzy of unadulterated free (i.e., debt-fueled) federal money-grubbing.

the whole colored tier system was a farcical distraction from real mitigations like quarantining nursing homes and their staff who'd volunteer for 24-hour hero pay and 2-week on-off cycles (long enough to recuperate and re-quarantine), and asking people to distance indoors around familiars, which is where most transmission happens, rather than around strangers or out on the street where your silly mask-wearing does less than nothing. 90% of angelenos, by my anecdotal count, still wear masks outdoors, as if it were a talisman against impending death.

despite unceasing media howling, our infection rates held relatively steady for a year, until recently, when vaccinations finally started to have a real effect on those rates. none of that (double-)mask-wearing, excessive hand-sanitizing, overly restrictive retail-closing, and incessant surface-disinfecting propounded by the state/county/city did anything to mitigate spread, only modest distancing indoors and restricted interfamilial contact had much mitigative effect (and the latter could have been handled much less invasively and damagingly).

i'm decidedly unamused by the stupidity of it all and ready for new leadership of any stripe other than democrat or republican.

While I despise Cuomo, I'm a little leary about condemning politicians about their actions back in the early days of the pandemic. Taking action is sometimes necessary even with incomplete or bad information, and it will sometimes turn out to have been the wrong decision. That's inevitable. It would often be worse to have an executive that is paralyzed in fear of making a decision that turns out to be wrong.

Now, the post-facto coverup, that doesn't deserve any benefit of the doubt. That's just sleaze and corruption.

The early days of the pandemic the first outbreak was in a nursing home in Washington.

That was when we were still counting the first hundred and contact tracing.

The people running the homes dissented against it. He still did it.

It doesn't take a genius to know you will infect elderly people by sending a highly contagious disease into their facility.

The cover up is beyond despicable, but the original action is indefensible.

Where could those people going back to nursing home go? I'm assuming that if another facility or their family could have taken them they would have opted for that. Reminder that likely these people needed 24/7 skilled nursing help.

45 other states found ways to safely handle this scenario.

Either properly supply your nursing homes with PPE or bring the nursing home staff to the hospitals.

And if there aren't enough bodies to meet that requirement, then what?

> Either properly supply your nursing homes with PPE or bring the nursing home staff to the hospitals.

The PPE that was acutely in short supply and unavailable at the beginning of the pandemic? Even doctors and nurses didn't have adequate PPE back then, and many of them got sick and died because of it.

> and many of them got sick and died because of it.

Source of people dying due to lack of PPE?

As I understand it, there was always a low supply, not no supply.

Other states managed to supply their nursing homes just fine.

Seems like rationalization. Cuomo never came out and said this was caused by lack of PPE.

Unless you have a source that they weren't able to equip their nursing homes due to supply issues you are assuming.

UK did exactly the same thing.

Everyone was panicking that the epidemic would grow exponentially and the hospitals would get over-run. Hence freeing up beds, and building a bunch of eventually pointless overflow hospitals.

A lot of modelling was claiming that's exactly what would happen, e.g. Imperial College London claiming millions of deaths, while the actual infection curves never hit those numbers.

In hindsight, that's not how the virus works, it seems to infect clusters and then drops and eventually levels out, jumps to a new clusters does the same thing, and on.

> Imperial College London claiming millions of deaths, while the actual infection curves never hit those numbers.

Because we took action to avoid that.

I truly don't understand why people keep repeating such dezinformatsiya.

The Imperial College report included projections if all recommended NPIs were implemented. That includes lockdowns, masks, social distancing, and so on.

Those projections were still wildly off the mark. There is no way to look at their projections and take them seriously as modelers. They were simply wrong. They made bad parameter assumptions, didn't question their results or cross-validate, and ran with the scariest projections of their models.

I don't think that's correct.

https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/in-defense-of-mathema...

"For those readers who are unfamiliar with it, the Imperial College model is the one that projected that 2.2 million Americans (and 510,000 residents of the UK) could die from COVID-19 over the next two years without public health interventions."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01003-6

"When updated data in the Imperial team’s model indicated that the United Kingdom’s health service would soon be overwhelmed with severe cases of COVID-19, and might face more than 500,000 deaths if the government took no action... The same model suggested that, with no action, the United States might face 2.2 million deaths..."

You should read the reports, and not news articles about the reports. These news articles are referring to the very first report, which made projections for the UK through October 2020.

Here's the March 26, 2020 report, covering the rest of the world, with far more specific predictions:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/m...

In this report, they predict 2.2 million deaths in the US in the unmitigated scenario, and over 1 million in the "social distancing" scenario. Their projection if the US "suppressed" the virus (by uniformly cutting contacts by 75% as soon as the death rate exceeded 1.6 per 100k; by my math, that's about 5,000 deaths) was 474,000 dead.

So, uh...that was wrong.

They projected 40 million deaths, worldwide (current actual total 3.14M) in the unmitigated scenario, with between 1.9M and 10.5M deaths in the "total suppression" scenario (depending on how soon lockdowns occurred).

If you go to the spreadsheet [1], you'll see lots of other fun projections:

* 470,000-670,000 deaths in Japan in the "social distancing" scenarios (current total: 10,031, despite living mostly normally throughout 2020).

* 330k-740k deaths in the "social distancing" scenarios for France (620k-760k "unmitigated"; current total: just over 3M, despite a year of strict interventions).

* Let's not forget their projection of 60,000-90,000 deaths in Sweden, in the "unmitigated" scenario (current total: 13,968).

Overall, their predictions bear very little resemblance to reality.

[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

Edit: I copied the wrong number for current deaths for France. Should be 104k, not 3M.

Here's the March 26, 2020 report

Okay. And the revised reports?

I don't care what they did after they knew the answer. In the one prospective test that mattered, they utterly, hilariously failed. And in the process they caused huge collateral damage to society.

This is why, in most fields of modeling with any intellectual rigor, we have blinded prospective tests.

Which report(s) were cited in the official reports / documents recommending / specifying mitigation strategies? Is there a timeline anywhere?

It was always a bad decision, and we questioned it in realtime.

Also, after the death toll rolled in they deleted the executive order from the New York State website despite it still being in effect.

There was a cover up from the moment the order was issued, I'm not sure how this action was taken in good faith.

Threatening to take medical licenses away for administering vaccines to people who weren’t eligible even if the vaccine was going to be thrown away.... and then doing a 180 and threatening to take away medical licenses if vaccines were not administered.

Writing a book about his supposed epic handling of the virus.

Still in office.

And he won an Emmy for it!

I am a New Yorker that had a relative die of COVID in a nursing home last year. I could understand the decision at first because they were literally constructing hospitals on athletic fields at my local university to deal with the packed hospitals. But own up to it and don't cover it up.

Regardless of your political persuasion what Cuomo did is wrong by covering it up. We can't have 2 standards for politicians based on if it is someone on your team.

Did those hospitals ever get used? I heard some reports that the auxiliary hospitals brought to NYC (especially the floating Navy(?) one) never even saw patients, for lots of obnoxious red-tape reasons.

No not really. The literal field hospitals were not done before the spike subsided, and the ship saw only a few patients. The ship was specifically NOT for covid patients, and so few patients that were not COVID were coming in. And yes there was a lot of red tape to get someone there.

Not just sleaze and corruption. This administration was hiding data about a pandemic when we desperately needed more information about how to fight the pandemic. That is despicable and indefensible.

I can forgive bad decisions in a time of crisis. But what they did was way beyond that.

> He knowingly sent people with covid into nursing homes against the will of the people running them...

Don't mean to be aggressive but where else would you like for the people whose domicile is in the nursing home to go? These are not people in independent living facilities, they likely need 24/7 skilled care. Allowing the people to go back to the nursing home (aka their home) seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It unfortunately didn't play out so well and I am glad I wasn't the one making that decision.

I think it was a tough decision. The nursing homes could have contained the spread but clearly were incapable of doing so.

> Then stonewalled the Feds asking for information about those deaths.

No excuse for that, just lay it all out. The stonewalling was intentional and possibly illegal, he should answer for that.

There was a hospital ship he could have used, it only had 179 patients over 3 weeks. There were hospitals made that never reached full capacity. Hell, setup a tent. You're saying the only option was to infect and kill 15,000 people?

The hospital ships weren't for covid patients, but for others who couldn't get a bed due to the hospitals being over capacity. The military specifically was testing everyone coming to make sure they didn't have covid because it can spread way faster in the confines of a ship.

The point is those ships were under capacity the whole time.

Send more non-covid patients to them, keep elderly patients in the hospitals. New York never reached full capacity overall.

If you MUST send covid patients to nursing homes, make sure they are prepared with PPE.

Other states did so, Cuomo and the 5 other governors should have known to do so. We already had outbreaks in a nursing home that everyone was aware of.

That was true initially, but they changed tack about a week later. The ship reduced capacity from 1000 beds to 500 specifically so that they could accomodate covid patients, because there weren't enough other patients to matter. In addition, the Javits center field hospital never reached more than about 5% of its available capacity. Meanwhile the nursing home down the street from me was begging the city to let them send their covid positive residents to to the ship, or to the javits, were told that those were only for hospital overflow, and they should keep the residents in place. more than 60 of them died, the highest death toll of any nursing home in the state.

Hospitals did in fact need the beds (nursing home beds >>> hospital beds). Additionally they are ill-equipped for the skilled help these people needed. People suffer from dementia/alzheimers and hospitals only option is to handcuff people to their beds (which is inhumane long-term).

I don't want to play politics and I do think more could have been done here). Like: quickly granting nursing homes aid in terms of PPE + cash + national guard help. I'm just trying to change your mind that the situation was much more nuanced that the NYTimes is advocating for.

Because when it's your guy getting attacked, it's a conspiracy. When it's the other guy, it's righteous.

> The nursing home scandal was known long before. The sex scandal seemed to be used to cover that up.

The opposite, I thought -- he seemed to be weathering the nursing home scandal, and now the sex scandal seems to be taking him down. Before his sexual behavior was publicized, people were joking/not joking that Andrew Cuomo was the poster child for our (Democrats') inability to hold anyone accountable for anything as long as they seemed woke and likable and said all the right things on cultural issues. Then his sexual behavior hit the news, and it was like, wow, is there anything metoo can't do? At least now Democrats nationally want him gone, though it's always harder to get a popular politician's own constituents to turn against him.

I’m under the impression that people were supposed to be allowed to return to their nursing homes, from where they left.

After they left the hospital they needed somewhere to go. Otherwise, they would be homeless.

If nursing homes couldn’t safely take recovering patients back then people were in danger before these people left for the hospital.

I also imagine there were COVID patients in the homes who didn’t need to go to a hospital

Nobody will ever be prosecuted for this, and that's less people taking what politicians see as limited funds.