While government officials across the country were preparing citizens for the coronavirus and ensuing local shutdowns, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio encouraged the city’s younger residents to continue life as normal.
“If you’re under 50 and you’re healthy, which is most New Yorkers, there’s very little threat here,” de Blasio told MSNBC on March 10, just one day before President Trump suspended travel to and from Europe due to the continued spread of COVID-19.
That same day, New York City Health Commissioner Oxiris Barbot marched down to City Hall and urged de Blasio to begin shutting the city down to better control the virus which had already appeared in New York’s hospitals. De Blasio refused, arguing that closing schools, restaurants, and other public spaces would damage the city’s economy and make him look weak.
Keep in mind what he had just told MSNBC’s Morning Joe: “This disease,” de Blasio said, “even if you were to get it, basically acts like a common cold or flu.”
COVID-19 has since taken 776 lives in New York City, and de Blasio is blaming everyone but himself.
In the span of just 15 days, New York City has become the epicenter of the United States’s coronavirus outbreak. Its hospitals and emergency rooms are struggling to keep up with the growing number of cases — so much so that officials have constructed an emergency field hospital in Central Park. This could not have been wholly prevented, but the city could have been more prepared.
But it was not, and de Blasio is to blame. He ignored the advice of his health officials and even contradicted them on national television. He was worried that an economic shutdown would disproportionately affect the city’s low-income residents and thus tarnish the public image he had created. He defied his own social distancing guidelines and used a public gym in Brooklyn as cases began to skyrocket, because his workout routine was more important than the city’s health. And even now, he refuses to take responsibility for his mismanagement, instead blaming the Trump administration for a shortage in testing.
Throughout this crisis, de Blasio has thought only of himself. A good leader would have listened to the advice of his health officials and made the difficult and necessary decision to sacrifice the economic stability of New York City for the sake of its public health — even at cost to himself. Instead, de Blasio prioritized his public image — an image that is now marked by mixed messaging, delayed responses, and blatant hypocrisy.
De Blasio would like the criticism to wait until “after this war is over,” as he told CNN’s Jake Tapper this weekend. Perhaps he thinks the longer this lasts, the more likely people will forget how he squandered the opportunity to lead. But the city will not forget. It won’t be able to. De Blasio made sure of that.
