Shrugged...

His stubborn refusal to take the coronavirus seriously may have caused thousands of deaths.

Aymerica’s COVID-19 devastation is disproportionately a story of New York State’s devastation, and New York State’s devastation is overwhelmingly a story of New York City’s devastation.

There’s a case to be made that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is the single individual in the United States who is most to blame for the catastrophic loss of human life.

I refer you to a grueling investigation by Charles Duhigg in the New Yorker that painstakingly compares the responses to the outbreak in Seattle and New York City. Seattle, paying heed to warnings from scientists, acted quickly to stem the outbreak; de Blasio, despite having several weeks after Seattle announced its first case to prepare for the deluge, shrugged at the virus and even advised people to go out and mingle. As of April 26 Seattle appears to be in good shape: King County, Washington has had 5,739 cases and 400 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University dashboard.

Yet on March 2, de Blasio urged New Yorkers in a tweet to go out on the town. On March 10, de Blasio said on MSNBC, “If you’re under 50 and you’re healthy, which is most New Yorkers, there’s very little threat here. This disease, even if you were to get it, basically acts like a common cold or flu. And transmission is not that easy.” 

On March 11, the day Seattle closed its schools, de Blasio said in a press conference, “If you are not sick, if you are not in the vulnerable category, you should be going about your life.” De Blasio didn’t acknowledge until April 3 that asymptomatic transmission was taking place, claiming he had learned this in the last two days. It had been 63 days since Anthony Fauci declared that asymptomatic transmission was certainly happening. Just a thought.