By
Andrea Widburg
Last Friday, Bret Stephens, of the
New York Times,
had an epiphany: Locking down America just because New York City is having problems is a bad idea. He thinks the problem is that New York is so densely populated. What he misses is that Mayor de Blasio's and Gov. Cuomo's policies exacerbated the virus. They are the poster boys for why Democrats should never have power.
To his credit, Stephens finally realized that the Wuhan virus is not an American problem. It’s primarily a New York problem, followed by a handful of other Democrat-run cities:
As of Friday, there have been more Covid-19 fatalities on Long Island’s Nassau County (population 1.4 million) than in all of California (population 40 million). There have been more fatalities in Westchester County (989) than in Texas (611). The number of Covid deaths per 100,000 residents in New York City (132) is more than 16 times what it is in America’s next largest city, Los Angeles (
. If New York City proper were a state, it would have suffered more fatalities than 41 other states combined.
Having figured this out, Stephens reached the next logical point:
Americans are being told they must still play by New York rules — with all the hardships they entail — despite having neither New York’s living conditions nor New York’s health outcomes. This is bad medicine, misguided public policy, and horrible politics.
What Stephens missed, and what matters for the political choices voters make in November, is that New York’s problem isn’t just population density. New York suffers from appalling political decisions at both the state and the local level.
Probably the worst decision governor Cuomo made was to force New York’s nursing homes to accept people who tested positive for the Wuhan virus. The people most vulnerable to the Wuhan virus are the elderly and the sick, so this decision
turned nursing homes into charnel houses:
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