Bill DeBlasio is getting hammered today on the Sunday shows and there’s a viral twitter thread with what look like egregious and embarrassing quotes. But focus on the right stuff. deBlasio failed the city terribly. But most of the quotes in that viral thread are bogus ...
2/ examples and the same applies even to many of those gettin shown on cable news. Things he said in January and February were actually pretty sensible. To the degree they look iffy in hindsight it’s largely because of the lack of testing and restrictive CDC guidelines ...
3/ that hid the fact that disease was already actively spreading in the country. The thing to look at is the first half of March. By then we knew the virus was in the country and by March 1st we knew of at least one case in New York City.
4/ It’s from this point that DeBlasio increasingly dug in his heels on taking any dramatic action. He and his advisors also dug in on advice about how the disease spreads that not only seems wrong in retrospect but was fairly clearly wrong or unconfirmed at the time.
5/ In these cases the Mayor explicitly noted that the guidance about how long the virus could survive on surfaces was different from the WHO but said that the city’s public health officials had a more accurate take. New York does have a world class public health ...
6/ departure. But getting out ahead of global health authorities was at least arrogant and reckless when so little was known. He also insisted that the virus could only be transmitted directly from one persons cough or sneeze on to or into another persons mouth, nose or eyes.
7/ This was at best getting ahead of what was known and seems now to be wrong. He claimed at various points that asymptomatic transmission wasn’t possible. That was at best unknown at the time and now appears to be clearly wrong. Public authorities around the world have ...
8/ grappled with very limited knowledge about a new disease. But the unknowns dictate caution rather than assurance about things that may not be true. Then there was the schools. As it became clear that the virus was spreading through the city DeBlasio became locked in the ...
9/ idee fixe that the schools simply could not be closed. Pressed on the schools potential as a vector of disease, DeBlasio deployed a series of increasingly nonsensical reasons for keeping them open. Late in the second week of March he responded to an increasingly ...
10/ plaintive question about the schools with a disquisition on the nature of leadership in which he explained that it was the role of a leader not to be distracted when all are panicking around him. In other words, his insistence on keeping the schools open had become a ...
11/ closed loop. Anyone who disagreed was one of those hair on fire panickers whom it is a leaders job to ignore. Closing schools in a city like New York imposes immense hardship, especially on the poorest and most marginalized parts of the community. But DeBlasio and ...
12/ schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had simply adopted a fixed position about the schools - the schools can never close - and were reasoning the city’s whole public health response from that fixed position. We know in retrospect that the city’s public health department ...
14/ had been advising the mayor to close the schools for a week before he relented. That fact was never shared with city residents. He blew it. And I’ve barely scraped the surface of all the examples. But the out of context clips from January and February just weaken ...
15/ the case. They’re dumb and out of context and really are Monday morning quarterbacking in the worst sense.
