CITY HEALTH COMMISSIONER DR BARBOT RESIGNS AND SLAMS DE BLASIO ON THE WAY OUT

Dr Oxiris Barbot resigned as the City's Health Commissioner this morning. Her resignation email was obtained by the Times and published in the SI Advance. These two paragraphs kind of neatly sum up the state of New York City government in 2020:

“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,” she said in her resignation email obtained by The Times to de Blasio.

“Our experts are world renowned for their epidemiology, surveillance and response work. The city would be well served by having them at the strategic center of the response not in the background,” she said.

We. of course, could say the same for the schools where teachers and administrators are ignored as the city/DOE plans for September.

For those who want to know more about what happened in March during the critical days when the city stayed open for too long, this piece in the New Yorker from April 26, 2020 is a good start. 

An excerpt:

Today, New York City has the same social-distancing policies and business-closure rules as Seattle. But because New York’s recommendations came later than Seattle’s—and because communication was less consistent—it took longer to influence how people behaved. According to data collected by Google from cell phones, nearly a quarter of Seattleites were avoiding their workplaces by March 6th. In New York City, another week passed until an equivalent percentage did the same. Tom Frieden, the former C.D.C. director, has estimated that, if New York had started implementing stay-at-home orders ten days earlier than it did, it might have reduced covid-19 deaths by fifty to eighty percent. Another former New York City health commissioner told me that “de Blasio was just horrible,” adding, “Maybe it was unintentional, maybe it was his arrogance. But, if you tell people to stay home and then you go to the gym, you can’t really be surprised when people keep going outside.”

De Blasio is still in charge now as we contemplate reopening school buildings for the fall. Where is the petition for his resignation?