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Comment by kbelder | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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!

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