De Blasio's coronavirus crisis

Mayor Bill de Blasio | Getty Images — Mayor Bill de Blasio | Yana Paskova/Getty Images

NEW YORK — New York City’s top health officials were tracking warning signs of the flu, and didn’t like what they were seeing: A massive, late-season spike in influenza-like-illnesses that revealed a troubling aberration.

So on March 10, Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot went to City Hall to share the findings with Mayor Bill de Blasio and urge him to begin taking more drastic action to control the spread of the coronavirus, which has since claimed 450 lives across New York City. De Blasio resisted, believing that closing schools, restaurants and cultural centers would cripple the city’s economy and disproportionately hurt the marginalized residents he aims to prioritize.

What followed was a week of mixed messages, delayed decisions and feuds that escalated to what one person described as “warfare” amongst city officials, all while the federal government withheld critical aid to New York and Gov. Andrew Cuomo grappled with whether to impose draconian mandates.

A week later, the mayor began following most of Barbot’s advice, after plodding through a decision-making process that was described by people involved as tense, laborious and rife with conflict. As he huddled in City Hall with top aides, contending with how to handle the biggest crisis of his tenure, residents of one of the most densely-populated cities in the country continued to cram into subway cars, dine in restaurants and pop into their local watering holes — something de Blasio encouraged only hours before he ordered them shut on March 15.

New York City is now ground zero of a global catastrophe few saw coming — one that has thrust de Blasio into the national spotlight, laying bare his managerial vulnerabilities and threatening to undermine the legacy he has been building over the past six years. What’s more, the virus shows no signs of abating anytime soon.

“I think in retrospect we deliberated too long on the various shutdown steps,” City Council Member Mark Levine, who chairs the health committee, said in an interview. “We’re racing against the clock in slowing the spread of this, and even a day or two can change the trajectory.”

The virus was first reported in New York City on March 1, when a health care worker who had been infected in Iran began displaying symptoms after returning home. By then, the alarm bells had already begun ringing and would grow deafening in the subsequent weeks.

“You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus,” warned the headline of a Feb. 24 story in The Atlantic, which quoted a Harvard epidemiology professor predicting up to 70 percent of the world’s population would be infected within the year.

City Council Member Steve Levin read the article in horror, and began cautioning “anybody that would listen, including members of the administration,” he said in an interview. “I mean, I was telling it to the cops outside [City Hall] at the metal detectors.”

Levin said he reached out to de Blasio’s chief of staff, Emma Wolfe, who was promoted to deputy mayor last week as she helps lead the city’s response. “She was adamant that, ‘We get it. We know what’s happening,’” Levin said. In fact she was so consumed with responding to the virus that when he broached her about another subject during the first week of March, she brushed him off, saying she could focus on nothing else, he added.

De Blasio showed less urgency.

“I caught him in passing and he listened,” Levin said. Asked how the mayor reacted, he paused to carefully choose his words. “You know, he was, I think — along the lines of, ‘I hear you,’” he said, and declined to go into further detail.

Meanwhile, city health officials were watching emergency room visits from possible coronavirus cases explode — 1,156 patients complaining of flu-like symptoms on March 12, compared to no more than 422 on any given day in March last year, The Wall Street Journal reported.

But de Blasio was determined that life in the city continue apace.

He and top health officials fought during lengthy planning meetings in City Hall, according to multiple accounts from sources with knowledge of the interactions and published reports. The discord had been years in the making — several current and former city officials said he has long distrusted the top brass of the health department, feeling they do not understand politics and public relations and mishandled an outbreak of Legionnaires disease in 2016.

“He certainly has no trust in his field of expert commissioners and high ranking agency officials,” one former City Hall official said this week. “If an expert at an agency says to him, ‘Mayor this is what’s happening,’ instead of granting that some truth and acting on it, he will laboriously poke and prod at that opinion for hours.”

Another former aide said de Blasio has misgivings about government bureaucrats, subject experts and those he perceives to be in the “chattering class,” particularly when the chatter amounts to criticism of his leadership.

To that end, de Blasio kept schools open for days after parents, teachers and members of his own administration urged him to close them, touching off a feud with the teachers union, which chastised the health department this week after a 36-year-old principal died from the coronavirus.

Three city officials familiar with his decision-making process said he was relying on advice from Mitchell Katz, head of the city’s public hospital system, who worried school closures would compromise staffing levels at hospitals during an emergency. De Blasio was also concerned about the lopsided impact it would have on low-income students and single-parent households.

He insisted schools would remain open during TV interviews on the morning of March 15, even as he was preparing to announce a system-wide closure later that day.

“You know I hated closing the schools. I thought it was going to cause all sorts of other problems and of course it has,” de Blasio said during a radio interview Friday morning. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has been granted public hero status during this crisis, similarly reversed his stance on closing schools within a matter of hours that Sunday.

He and de Blasio were also at odds over whether to require New Yorkers to “shelter in place,” an argument of semantics that went on for days as residents were left without clear guidance. De Blasio was calling for the policy earlier than Cuomo, while also signaling confusion about its implementation.

“What is going to happen with folks who have no money? How are they going to get food? How are they going to get medicines?” he asked during a news conference on March 17. “There’s a lot of unanswered questions.”

In another example of his mixed messaging, he has said he will make a “first attempt” to reopen schools by April 20, while also calling President Donald Trump’s push to bring businesses back by Easter, which falls on April 12, “false hope.”

Yet on Friday de Blasio tweeted that April 5 is “the day the strains we’re seeing right now on medical supplies and personnel could overwhelm us if we don’t get the help we need. This is a race against time.”

De Blasio spent days deliberating over whether to cancel the St. Patrick’s Day parade, even after other cities canceled theirs, did not provide clear guidance over a municipal work-from-home policy, according to multiple agency leaders, and argued with library officials who wanted to close their branches before he was ready.

And in arguably his most ridiculed move, he hit the gym the morning after he closed schools, just as “social distancing” guidelines were starting to take effect and fitness centers were preparing to shutter that evening.

Perhaps more importantly, his administration’s guidance on testing for the virus was inconsistent, as was his tone about its severity.

Shortly after the World Health Organization deemed the coronavirus a pandemic on March 11, the mayor was asked to respond to expected recommendations about a possible quarantine.

“I think we can say at this point in time we’re looking at all the guidance, but with a bit of a trust-but-verify worldview,” he said.

He also said the city’s hospitals were ready for an influx of patients. “We have 1,200 beds that we can activate readily,” he said on March 8. “Just the fact that you’ll turn off a lot of non-essential things and turn all that talent and capacity to a crisis, should give New Yorkers a lot of confidence that, you know, even with hundreds of cases, we’d be able to handle it.”

This week The New York Times chronicled the nightmarish scenes from one of the city’s public hospitals, where 13 people died in a single day.

Privately, people across City Hall have begun to wonder whether de Blasio’s week of delayed action put people in danger.

One Council member expressed those concerns publicly: “By failing to disclose virus cases in schools, they kept families in the dark and left more lives at risk,” Mark Treyger, who chairs the education committee, said in response to the principal’s death.

Mayoral spokesperson Freddi Goldstein said city hospitals and the health department have stockpiles of protective gear, but she declined to provide information about the amount of supplies on hand when the first case was confirmed on March 1. De Blasio has been asking the federal government to provide 15,000 ventilators, 3 million masks, 45 million gloves, gowns and face shields, 500,000 goggles and another 50 million surgical masks.

“It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and have an opinion,” she said. “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.”

One public health official who has long advised de Blasio and is part of high-level briefings on the administration’s plans defended his governing style.

“It was hours and hours of detailed questions,” Irwin Redlener, a medical doctor and the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, said in a recent interview. “If anybody gave him sort of general information, he was forceful and aggressive saying, ‘I don’t want that; I want the details, I want the numbers.’”

“I was pretty impressed,” he added. “I was slightly intimidated because he was very demanding, in a way that was appropriate.”

Redlener said he would have preferred faster action on closures of public spaces, but said the mayor was trying to account for a mountain of consequences — backsliding students, job losses, economic devastation — all while confronting a “distressing” lack of clarity from the federal government.

Yet even this week, de Blasio, who’s fond of offering “blunt truths,” was voicing uncertainty about whether to close public playgrounds. “If we think people are abiding by the rules, we’ll leave them open. If we think different, we’ll shut them down,” he said Friday. Meanwhile, city officials have begun posting “play at your own risk” signs.

While de Blasio works out of City Hall, his top aides overseeing the response were hunkered down for weeks at the Office of Emergency Management in Brooklyn, where staffers from city agencies are rotating shifts in a 40-person room serving as a command center. The arrangement ensures de Blasio is physically separated from his first deputy mayor, Dean Fuleihan, who would take over the city if de Blasio could not serve and has recently begun working from his apartment.

The team is relying on a pandemic response plan previously established by the emergency management department, though a workshop the city’s hospital agency hosted in late 2018 exploring the impact of a worldwide avian flu outbreak drew troubling conclusions: “The workshop highlighted how quickly such an outbreak might overwhelm the city’s health care delivery system,” the Greater New York Hospital Association wrote in a release to its members.

Former OEM commissioner Joe Esposito, who de Blasio fired more than a year ago, defended his former boss, saying in an interview this week, “I’m not sure I would’ve done anything differently.”

As the days have tumbled along and New Yorkers have begun to settle into new routines for an indeterminate amount of time, de Blasio’s messages have become clearer and much more dire.

He has been spending up to three hours a day preparing for his daily news conference, often facing the public around 5 p.m., well after Cuomo has already addressed New Yorkers in briefings that kick off the day’s news cycle and attract a loyal following.

“[De Blasio] keeps using this wartime analogy. He does not seem like a general. He seems like he’s writing a book about the general. Cuomo seems like a general,” a former City Hall official said.

On Friday, the mayor vented his frustration at the ordeal.

“This whole godforsaken experience has been a learning curve,” he said on his weekly radio interview on WNYC’s “The Brian Lehrer Show.“ “None of us have been through anything like this.”

Dan Goldberg contributed to this report.