The Empire Center for Public Policy recently unveiled new research in a webinar suggesting the state’s first wave actually started around late January or early February of 2020, about a month before the state’s first lab-confirmed case, and peaked in mid-March. The government watchdog group is considered fiscally conservative. Citing a retrospective analysis from the University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation, Empire Center researcher Bill Hammond says the state’s infection rate may have already been on the decline around the time then-Governor Andrew Cuomo announced lockdowns to “stop the spread” and scrambled to increase hospital capacity. Hammond wonders how officials might have acted differently, had they known about the virus sooner.
“Maybe you would have made different decisions, including not [making] such a risky decision to send COVID patients into nursing homes," says Hammond. "That decision probably made things worse for the people in the homes, and it certainly did not work out well for the governor, because it became a huge scandal for him and contributed to his resignation.”
Using data from all 3,140 U.S. counties as well as international data collected by the IHME, Hammond compared the mortality rate of New York City to that of hundreds of other jurisdictions in their worst 12 weeks, respectively. Hammond says more than 23,000 people died in New York City during its worst period, from mid-March to mid-June of 2020, equating to a mortality rate of 261 per 100,000 people.
While Hammond admits the data is imperfect — some jurisdictions, including New York, underreported COVID deaths during the pandemic — he says the difference is staggering.
“The median turned out to be Australia, at 21 [deaths] per 100,000 [people]...And then finally, New York City was 12.5 times worse than the global median, its worse 12 weeks," he explains. "Only one other location posted an even worse outcome, and that was Mexico City around the holidays of 2020/2021. No other jurisdiction broke 200 [deaths per 100,000 people].”
Pulling from CDC data, Hammond says New York City’s peak mortality rate was 64 percent higher than the comparable rate for any state, and 63 percent higher than that of any of the country’s 50 largest cities. He says New York City lost a greater share of its population in those 12 weeks than 85 percent of the jurisdictions in the IHME data set did in three years.
The New York City Health Department did not return a comment in time for broadcast. In a statement, a spokesperson for the New York State Department of Health says the department maintains its actions saved the lives of countless New Yorkers in the early days of the pandemic, adding, “New York’s response was based on the best available information at the time. Much has changed in three years, including the development and evolution of wastewater monitoring, and gives us more of an early warning system, for which there was none in early 2020. We have learned a great deal since then, and will read this report as part of our continuing effort to learn and improve.”
“The metric that really matters in a pandemic is how many people die," notes Hammond. "And by that metric, New York City’s handling of the pandemic in that first wave was not just subpar or below average, it was among the very worst in the world.”
To be clear, upon the arrival of a vaccine later on in the pandemic, hot spots shifted in the U.S. Looking at state-by-state data from Statista, California has the highest overall death toll in the nation as of March of this year, with more than 101,000 people killed by the virus. New York has the fourth-highest death toll, behind California, Texas, and Florida.
The research comes amid the latest uptick in COVID cases nationwide and reports of a new variant. Governor Kathy Hochul has urged New Yorkers to take extra precautions against COVID, adding that the state is handing out free masks and monitoring wastewater for the presence of BA.2.86. State Health Commissioner Dr. James McDonald says the new variant is the most genetically different strain since the original Omicron variant. The CDC says it might be more capable of causing infection, but it doesn’t appear to be more severe or resistant to treatment at this time. The latest data from the CDC’s COVID Data Tracker shows two newer subvariants of Omicron, EG.5 and FL.1.5.1, are currently the most common strains in New York.
Hammond says he hopes officials take his report with them going forward. He also wants to see a thorough review of the state’s and city’s responses to COVID in those early months. While he points to a number of reasons why New York City’s first wave spiked so fast, so high — including heavy tourism, a lack of screening by the federal government at airports, and what he calls a “botched” rollout of test kits — he says the city’s public health system should have been able to detect things sooner and act faster.
“The events of 2020 are kind of a road map. They’re the weaknesses in our public health system, and we should follow that road map as well as we can and repair our public health system before the next virus arrives," he advises.
You can read the whole report, titled "Behind the Curve," here.
