I don't live in NY so I am curious. NY is one of the worst hit states in the country and had 8 months to prepare for this. What do you think went wrong?
Is it local/state officials' colossal incompetence, something that they are quite known for? For a state with one of the highest tax rates, you would expect better from them.
The constant infighting between de Blasio and Cuomo certainly isn't helping things. Cuomo has a very "my way or the highway" style of management but then doesn't release details fast enough for there to be an effective ground game, so individual institutions or counties are stuck to do their own planning.
At least there's a somewhat-coherent PR response, but that doesn't help get jabs in arms.
I think you have 2 factors.
Governor Cuomo & Mayor DeBlasio hate each other.
BdB is all rhetoric and mildly incompetent but means well.
Cuomo is a very clever political machine, and doesn’t want BdB to get any wins.
Additionally there’s a lot of state vs local control issues for NYC where NYC either doesn’t have authority or the authority is nebulous so Cuomo can claim things aren’t BdB’s call.
There have been numerous times during the pandemic where BdB called for something like closing schools, etc where Cuomo issued a stinging rebuke and then made the call himself 2-3 days later.
Secondly, this is a national issue.
As much as NY is a basket case.. the state by state stats are quite similar. Depending on the week NY is outperforming lots of states in the vax distribution. Relative to Feds, State governments are not that big and do not have a lot of idle capacity. Whatever idle capacity we did have has been taken out by PPE distribution, testing roll out and dealing with all the sick.
Realistically this is a FEMA/NatGuard issue at this point. We can’t expect to have any nurse capacity for vax considering hospitals are all full. It’s a shame there was no planning for that in advance, but par for the course with DJT.
Fortunately it sounds like Biden is going to pull the trigger on that in first 100 days.
I don't understand why you think the states shouldn't be able to handle this. It's their responsibility.
How is the federal government supposed to magically increase hospital capacity? Nobody ever wanted to pay for a bunch more idle and unused hospital capacity. It's a pandemic with lots of victims, you do the best you can, and that's how it goes.
And if NY is a basket case (I'm not arguing) the federal government may be even more so. They don't exactly have a good record of responding to emergencies, either.
Is it local/state officials' colossal incompetence, something that they are quite known for? For a state with one of the highest tax rates, you would expect better from them.