12 LONGISLANDPRESS.COM • MAY 2020
COVER FEATURE
CUOMO LEADS NY IN BATTLE
BY TIMOTHY BOLGER
Call it The Cuomo Show.
Since the first case of coronavirus was
confirmed in New York State on March 1,
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s much-anticipated
daily news briefings on the latest efforts
to combat the pandemic have catapulted
the governor into the national spotlight
as the New York Metro area became one
of the hardest-hit COVID-19 hotspots in
the world. Like any good show, sometimes
the briefings are comical, other
times they’re controversial, there are
high-profile cameos — and viewers are
always talking about it afterward.
“Your daily press conferences have
become must-see TV for a lot of people,”
former New York City Mayor Michael
Bloomberg, who is helping to coordinate
the state’s coronavirus tracing
program, told Cuomo on April 30 while
teleconferencing into a recent briefing.
Don’t bother calling anyone between
11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., some say.
They’ll be busy watching Cuomo for
news on the case rate, school closures,
and economic reopening. For his part,
Cuomo regularly likens himself to Sgt.
Joe Friday, the fictional detective from
the 1950s TV series Dragnet, who’s
oft-quoted catchphrase was “Just the
facts, ma’am.”
“My daughter says nobody understands
who Joe Friday is,”
Cuomo said in one of his April
briefings after again showing
a black-and-white picture of
the TV detective during the
slide show that accompanies
the governor’s briefings.
“That’s their mistake. Dragnet
was an underappreciated
cinematic treasure, in my
opinion.”
The governor’s not alone in
his persistence with the daily
briefings. Suffolk County
Executive Steve Bellone
has been holding livestreamed
video conference
calls with reporters
for the past two months,
even for a few weeks
while quarantined in
his own home after
coming in contact with top aides who
were diagnosed with COVID-19. Nassau
County Executive Laura Curran has
been holding briefings six days a week,
taking Sundays off. And President Donald
Trump has been holding near-daily
news briefings on the topic, although he
took a brief break after stirring controversy
by saying “it would be interesting
to check” if disinfectants could
be injected inside people
with the virus — a comment
he later said was
sarcasm.
Of course, while
Curran and Bellone
have nothing
but praise for the
governor, who’s a
fellow Democrat,
the contentious relationship
between
Cuomo and Trump,
a Republican — both
Queens natives — has
at times boiled over on
national television in real
time.
SPOILING FOR A FIGHT
A flashpoint in the briefings came on
April 17, when Trump criticized Cuomo
on Twitter during the governor’s news
conference and a reporter in attendance
read the president’s tweet aloud
so Cuomo could respond.
“Governor Cuomo should spend more
time ‘doing’ and less time
‘complaining,’” Trump
wrote. “Get out there
and get the job done.
Stop talking!”
Cuomo, who
had said days
earlier that he
would not engage
the often
combative president
in a fight
that would be a
distraction from
solving the deadly
health crisis
that they’re facing,
took the bait.
“If he’s sitting home watching TV, maybe
he should get up and go to work,” Cuomo
replied in a response that went on for
nearly 20 minutes, with the governor,
knowing the president was watching,
taking the unusual step of speaking
directly at the camera.
Although the two later met at the White
House to discuss response efforts — off
camera — a sticking point has been the
Empire State’s requests for more federal
assistance that Trump has sometimes
been reluctant to deliver, such as with
ventilators used in caring for the most
serious cases.
Before the state’s coronavirus hospitalization
rate peaked, Cuomo was
chiding Trump to send more hardto
find ventilators from the federal
stockpile to meet projected demand to
equip 40,000 intensive care unit beds
and 140,000 hospital beds, about triple
what the state normally has. Although
the healthcare system was inundated
with patients, the state neither hit the
goal of securing enough resources nor
reached that projected peak in cases.
As a result, a pair of temporary hospitals
that the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers built for
$250 million in
Stony Brook and
Old Westbury
were mothballed,
their
completion
coming just
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been holding daily coronavirus
news briefings for months.
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