The public health commissioner in New York City has resigned, citing her disappointment with how the city government has handled the coronavirus pandemic.
“I leave my post today with deep disappointment that during the most critical public health crisis in our lifetime, that the Health Department’s incomparable disease control expertise was not used to the degree it could have been,” Dr. Oxiris Barbot said in her resignation email, according to the New York Times.
Barbot sent her resignation letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday.
“Our experts are world renowned for their epidemiology, surveillance and response work,” she said. “The city would be well served by having them at the strategic center of the response not in the background.”
Barbot has taken issue with de Blasio’s recent decision to strip the local health department of the responsibilities associated with contact tracing, a practice during which government-funded trackers attempt to chart whom a coronavirus patient has been in contact with before and after testing positive for the virus.
De Blasio’s recent action on contact tracing delegated the responsibilities to public hospitals instead.
“Everything at Health and Hospitals has been based on speed and intensity and precision, and they’ve done an amazing job,” he said.
“These are core functions of public health agencies around the world, including New York City, which has decades of experience,” said Dr. Mary Bassett, a former health commissioner in the city. “To confront COVID-19, it makes sense to build on this expertise.”
New York City, once the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States, has seen a sharp fall in cases and deaths in recent weeks. More than 400,000 cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed in the state, and more than 32,000 New Yorkers have died of the disease.
