Caught between a mayor’s indecision and a president’s inattention, the nation’s largest city was left dangerously exposed to the coronavirus pandemic.
The threat of the coronavirus was looming over New York City, but Mayor Bill de Blasio was not especially worried. “I’m encouraging New Yorkers to go on with your lives + get out on the town despite Coronavirus,” he tweeted on March 2. There was an Italian film playing at Lincoln Center. He urged people to see it.
Freddi Goldstein, a spokeswoman for City Hall, countered such claims in an email to Yahoo News. “It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and have an opinion,” she said in response to criticisms by Williams and others who spoke to Yahoo News for this article. “The mayor carries the responsibility of 8.6 million New Yorkers. He must think about their safety, their livelihood, their education. Every decision he has made has been deliberate and thoughtful. That’s what you need in a crisis.
Williams argues that de Blasio had every warning sign necessary to prepare, given that the coronavirus’s appearance in the five boroughs was all but inevitable. “We’ve known that for weeks,” an audibly frustrated Williams told Yahoo News. “We were always going to be high-risk,” says one member of the City Council who would speak frankly only if granted anonymity. But like many others, he says that the mayor has only made things worse.
Despite his near daily appearances on cable news, however, de Blasio does not appear to have burnished his reputation the way predecessor Rudy Giuliani did after 9/11, when he became known as “America’s Mayor.” If the coronavirus has shattered Trump’s image as a managerial genius, it has hardly been much kinder to de Blasio, instead revealing shortcomings that have long been obvious to New York political observers.
Though critics may outnumber them, there are fans of de Blasio’s handling of the pandemic among members of the public as well, including outside his base of unionists and progressives. “I don’t agree with you on many issues, and some of the optics of your administration have been awful,” investor and CNBC pundit Guy Adami tweeted at de Blasio. Despite those reservations, Adami praised the mayor for “providing leadership during a time of historic uncertainty and apprehension.
Nor was de Blasio ready to announce the kinds of lockdown measures that had already shown success in parts of China and elsewhere. De Blasio said that beds and resources could be diverted from elsewhere. “You could fall back and get deeper and deeper and open up more and more,” he assured. De Blasio has blamed a negligent Trump administration for not providing the city with sufficient supplies to test for and treat the coronavirus. He has gone as far as accusing the president last Friday of a “willful betrayal of New York City,” even as he continued to plead with Trump for help.
Critics say that despite those logistical challenges, de Blasio could have done more. Much as Trump has chafed at restrictive measures prescribed by his administration, so did de Blasio resist shutting down critical parts of the city until it was too late. “It doesn’t entirely fit to cancel big events,” de Blasio said on March 9 of the St. Patrick’s Day parade, which for more than two centuries has been an event central to the life of the city.
“I got no exercise whatsoever during the weekend,” de Blasio said at a press conference later that day. “I was in this building a huge percentage of the time. I need exercise to be able to stay healthy.” The governor’s charmingly-crotchety-uncle explanation of self-quarantine went viral, thanks to comedian Samantha Bee, who branded him “America’s Dad.”
Last week, de Blasio told New Yorkers to expect a shelter-in-place order, apparently at the urging of his wife, Chirlaine McCray, who has no emergency management experience and was recently accused of mismanaging a $1 billion mental health effort.
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Everyone Who Has Left New York City Recently Should Self-Quarantine, Health Officials SayI’m a San Francisco-based reporter covering breaking news at Forbes. Previously, I’ve reported for USA Today, Business Insider, The San Francisco Business Times and San Jose Inside. I studied journalism at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and was an editor at The Daily Orange, the university’s independent student newspaper. Follow me on Twitter rachsandl or shoot me an email rsandlerforbes.com.
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