NY State – world’s 2d worst virus death rate! Dr. Fauci proclaims Cuomo “did it correctly”

Many states didn’t do enough to combat the COVID-19 coronavirus, but New York state did, Dr. Anthony Fauci told PBS in an interview Friday, July 17.

New York got hit worse than any place in the world. And they did it correctly by doing the things that you’re talking about.

Fauci is a close friend of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, which might partially explain why he overlooks the tragic fall of the Empire State.

Dr. Anthony Fauci has been so kind and helpful to me. I speak to health care professionals all across the globe, literally. But Dr. Fauci, I think, is just brilliant at this, and he has been so personally kind,’ Cuomo said Thursday.

I call him late at night. I call him in the middle of the night. I call him in the morning, and he’s been really a friend to me personally and the State of New York,’ Cuomo said of his relationship with Fauci.

Setting aside the mutual admiration society nonsense, do Fauci and Cuomo really believe that the pilot, who falls asleep and crashes the plane, deserves praise for not missing a day’s work in three years?

If New York State was a country, it would rank sixth in the total number of deaths from the virus, as of Sunday.

Even worse, if New York State has the second most deaths per million residents in the world – 1,674 – almost twice the first place country, Belgium (845). Adjacent New Jersey was the worst – 1,776.

The chart on right was prepared by this blog to illustrate the standings of some of our states, and how they would rank against entire countries in deaths per million. The worst-performing states were selected, along with the worst nations.

The top four poorest performers were all members of Cuomo’s so-called “Covid Corridor”, which was supposed to promote fewer deaths and have its members plan together for reopening.

New Jersey and New York are each about six times the virus death rate of the nation’s average – 432.

If we exclude NJ and NY from the U.S. average falls to 313, below Ireland. Adding CN and MA to NJ and NY, the nation’s average drops to 280.

The worldwide average deaths per million is 78.4.

Cuomo has also been in the headlines recently, lamenting that some southern and southwestern states are in deep crisis and their residents are not welcome where he governs.

The truth is that all of those states have done an exceptional job of keeping their citizens alive, and boast very low current and projected death rates, despite an influx of farm workers and refugees from the surging virus crisis in Mexico.

All the Southern/Western states are far below the Covid Corridor death rate. Florida, for example is one-seventh the NY or NJ rate, and Texas and North Carolina are less than one-tenth of NY or NJ deaths per million.

None of these states has anywhere near the 6,300 seniors who died in New York’s nursing homes, a catastrophe that would have been ameliorated had Cuomo not ordered infected seniors to be accepted by those facilities that were unprepared. That influx spread the virus among the most susceptible to death from the infection.

Both Fauci and Cuomo are experienced at gaining media attention. Fauci is interviewed by a different medium almost daily, and Cuomo has been doing daily briefings on the virus.

The governor claimed at one point that the state was short 30,000 ventilators, required thousands of additional hospital beds and hundreds more medical personnel. The federal government filled those Cuomo requests, which were later found to be grossly exaggerated. Only a couple hundred beds were used out of thousands supplied and few extra ventilators were needed.

Oddly, Cuomo seems to have no regrets on how he managed to top the world with the state’s death rate. Perhaps he has been believing those late night phone calls from the “good doctor.” That might explain the ludicrous poster (below) the governor produced to extol himself and his followers.

Twitter has been having fun with the Cuomo/Fauci relations, most humorous, but some very serious:

‘These two can lead us through the plague,” Rosie O’Donnell tweeted.

Strangely, Americans in one Wall Street-favored study seem to agree that the corona couple, regardless of facts, deserve our gratitude.

A Business Insider* poll found that Fauci and Cuomo scored first and second respectively on a list of US leaders trusted to inform the public about the coronavirus outbreak, over President Donald Trump, who placed last.

Cuomo’s reaction today was to ban more travelers to NY, claiming some “health knowledge superiority”, or just trying to make us forget his deadly mistakes? Everyone in red has to quarantine for 14 days if they arrive in Cuomo’s domain.