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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared he is done with coronavirus guessing and, in a rare admission, said that “we all failed” in getting the pandemic projections right.
The Democrat referred to the speculations by experts about the course of the virus during a news briefing Monday as he addressed questions about the reopening efforts in New York. Cuomo told reporters that hospitalization and death rate numbers were prime factors in decisions about the reopening of certain regions in the state, but there is no way to guess what the rates will be.
(Source: Fox News)
“Now, people can speculate. People can guess. I think next week, I think two weeks, I think a month,” Cuomo said on Memorial Day at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York City.
“I’m out of that business because we all failed at that business. Right?” he added. “All the early national experts – here’s my projection model, here’s my projection model. They were all wrong. They were all wrong.”
“There are a lot of variables. I understand that. We didn’t know what the social distancing would actually amount to. I get it, but we were all wrong,” Cuomo said. “So, I’m sort of out of the guessing business, right?”
New York saw over 23,000 deaths due to COVID-19, and more than 362,000 cases of the virus. Numbers began to decline and reached a new low in the daily death for the first time in two months over the weekend as fewer than 100 deaths were reported.
The drop in the number of cases and deaths, as well as a decline in hospitalizations, were part of the criteria set by the governor for beginning a phased reopening plan for the Empire State, which has been the nation’s epicenter for the pandemic.
But Cuomo’s criticisms of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) model echoed those of others who have argued that the shifting projections about the likely death tolls and cases of coronavirus caused confusion and led to many decisions that affected Americans.
While many praised Cuomo for his apparent leadership in the face of the crisis, plenty of others slammed him for the lack of the same, criticizing policies such as the controversial rule that sent nursing home residents who had tested positive for COVID-19 back to the long-term care facilities, infected countless others.
Dr. Marc Siegel of the NYU Langone Medical Center argued that government leaders should not be making decisions that affect their citizens based on “guesswork” from the so-called experts.
“When the governor says he is now beginning to figure out that the mathematical projections don’t work, let me tell you why they don’t work,” the Fox News medical analyst told “Fox & Friends” co-host Steve Doocy on Monday. “It’s because they’re based on guesses, they’re not based on real numbers.”
(Source: Fox News)
Siegel noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is “now saying that the death rate from COVID-19 is really about 0.3%, not 3% that we were hearing for months.”
“Does this mean it’s not a virus we should take seriously? Of course not,” he continued. “But it means governors, let alone doctors, should not be making mathematical projections or making decisions based on guesswork.”
Other reactions to Cuomo’s admission of failure noted that the Democrat leader was still not fully taking responsibility for his own disastrous policies, but attempting to finger point and pull others — including the Trump administration — into the circle of blame.
Fox News meteorologist Janice Dean, who lost both of her in-laws to coronavirus in New York, has been vocally critical of Cuomo and called him out again on Tuesday.
“So now @NYGovCuomo is just resorting to ‘everybody was wrong.’ How about just confessing you are terrible at your job?” she asked in a tweet.
100,000 deaths from Covid 19. One quarter of those deaths are from New York State. March 24 @NYGovCuomo said this about accountability:
“If someone wants to blame someone, blame me. There is no one else responsible.”
And now he blames everyone else.— Janice Dean (@JaniceDean) May 24, 2020
Plenty of other Twitter users agreed.
Cuomo played politics with this from the beginning. It backfired when the federal government delivered and he did not.
— Impeach Little Fat Asshat Brian Stelter (@realJamesIrwin) May 26, 2020
Cuomo should have referenced it as “he failed” and not “we all failed”. What a total loser
— GotASecond? (@stef_saywhat) May 25, 2020
What Chinese Corona has retaught us is people in government do their best but they only know so much. Gov Cuomo made every wrong move. By not focusing on the most vulnerable the elderly he actually expanded Corona. The CDC has also been less reliable than a coin flip.
— Matt Schlapp (@mschlapp) May 26, 2020
I love how Conservatives have been saying this for months but the media will only acknowledge it once a Democrat says the same thing.
— Miguel Granda (@MiguelAGranda) May 26, 2020
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Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida where she has been writing for the BizPacReview team since 2015.
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