This would be more easily achieved if they would just obey the idea of not using coercion to make people do things they don’t otherwise want to do unless you have clear evidence that what the people are doing is either harming others or imminently about to do so.
Stop coercing people based on guesses and theories and hopes.
In general, I agree. In this particular instance, however, I am equally disappointed by my own state's failure to impose restrictions when they should have as I am with the imposition of coercive measures whose efficacy is questionable, at best. New York has done almost everything wrong, starting on March 10th, when the virus was first detected in New Rochelle.
On that day, Governor Cuomo called in the National Guard to set up a "containment area" around that city, and set the troops to work cleaning up common areas. Unfortunately, that was the last thing the state did right because the actual vectors -- the people -- were still allowed to move about freely both within and outside the community; and the most important conduit of all, the MTA (the Metropolitan Transportation Authority), was not shut down.
The right thing to do at that point would have been to shut down and disinfect MTA (the conduit), and quarantine the people (the vectors) in all of the counties served by MTA. It was the one instance of authoritarian coercion that actually would have made sense.
To better understand my thinking, you have to understand that in a practical sense, "Downstate" New York is best defined as being the 12 counties that comprise the "Metropolitan Commuter Transportation District" (MCTD) served by MTA. Specifically, we're talking about the five counties of New York City, as well as Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland, Orange, and Putnam counties.
The MTCD counties outside of New York City can be schematically visualized as the circumference of a wheel, the city as the hub, and the MTA as the spokes. People from any of the counties can infect each other because they all converge in the hub every working day, using the MTA to get there and back; as well as to move around within the hub (the New York City buses and subways are also operated by the State MTA). The MIT study identified the subways as the primary conduit, but the MTA commuter railroads are how people from the surrounding counties get to and from the subways.
The sensible thing to do would have been to shut down all of MTA for disinfection and keep it closed for a few days to a few weeks to both assess the existing spread and prevent any additional spread. A quarantine should also have been imposed on the entire 12-county area, for the same reasons. Yes, it would have been draconian -- but less so than the state-wide and nationwide lockdown that eventually had to be implemented, largely as a result of not taking the right actions on March 10th.
Because the MTA was not shut down and the 12-county MTCD not quarantined, the virus was then able to spread throughout the United States by way of the airports and long-distance train and bus lines that share junctions with MTA trains and buses. What had been regional endemicity became a nationwide epidemic, with the majority of cases throughout the United States except for those on the West Coast now having been genetically identified as originating in New York.
This isn't a benefit-of-hindsight sort of thing. Shutting down the MTA and quarantining the MTCD were the obvious things to do even then, and literally everyone I know simply assumed that they would be done. The governor had to go out of his way to stress that restricting the movement of people was
not part of his "containment plan," as
this article (and many others) pointed out. What is the point of disinfecting a city without quarantining the vectors and shutting down the conduit?
My brother summed it up best in a text message he sent to me on March 10th: "This is the beginning of a disaster."
The counties outside the MTCD probably didn't need to be quarantined because the travel is more seasonal in nature; and on March 10th, we were between those seasons. The hunting season was over, and the trout season hadn't begun. The accelerated exodus of Downstate residents to their Upstate summer homes also hadn't begun. But imposing precautions on those who'd traveled to or from the belly of the beast (including myself, as I'd visited the Micro Center in Yonkers, New York, which is in Westchester County) was certainly in order.
I took precautions voluntarily and without fanfare; but because my ordinary life is pretty socially-distanced anyway, it mainly consisted of telling family and friends not to visit for a while because I'd been to Westchester County. Social distancing is easy when your regular lifestyle borders on that of a hermit.
There have been many, many other things the state did (or didn't do) that were dead wrong, but the most notorious was the March 25th directive forcing nursing homes to accept COVID-19 patients.
Like many stupid ideas, The March 25th directive was based on a noble ideological principle taking precedence over common sense. In order to protect COVID patients from being discriminated against, they were essentially made a protected class, which prevented nursing home operators from "discriminating" against them by exercising the common sense infection precaution of not housing sick people in close quarters with vulnerable people. That would have been unthinkable anyway. It's just something no responsible nursing home operator would ever do.
Except when the state compels them to.
It was an ideological victory. It also caused the deaths of thousands of elderly people in nursing homes. It has since been retracted (finally), without so much as an acknowledgment that it was a stupid directive to begin with, much less an apology. The state has now about-faced and is compelling robust infection-control precautions at the same nursing homes. But they have never come out and admitted that the March 25th directive was a deadly mistake. The blood on their hands says otherwise.
I could (and may some day) write a book about all the stupid things New York State has done in mismanaging this pandemic. If I also include New York City government's idiocy, it will wind up being a modern-day version of War and Peace. It's actually hard to find anything that they did right. I would have thought that the laws of probability being what they are, they would have done
something right, even if only by accident. But I search in vain for that something.
Actually, now that I think about it, they did do one thing that made sense: They waived the law requiring reusable grocery bags. Of course, that begs the question of why they even enacted a law that was so stupid and dangerous that they had to waive it for public health reasons; but such is government in New York. The law is still on the books. We've just been ordered not to obey it. That somehow makes sense here.
In the end, I don't disagree with you at all about the folly of imposing coercive measures that lack clear scientific evidence of efficacy. But I'm equally disgusted by failure to impose extreme measures for which there
does exist evidence, such as quarantining areas where a virus is known to be endemic; and in the specific case of New York, the abject irresponsibility of imposing measures that anyone who even knew what a virus was should also have known would kill people.
Rich
