Cuomo Finishes the Pandemic as He Started It, by Failing Seniors

In prioritizing vaccines, New York put ‘equity’ and special interests ahead of the elderly and vulnerable

By Allysia Finley of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"One study estimated that among patients hospitalized for Covid, those 65 to 74 were 5.77 times as likely to die than those 18 to 39. The difference between a diabetic and healthy patient (after controlling for age, sex, race and ethnicity) was only 19%."

"Mr. Cuomo initially refused to extend eligibility to those with chronic conditions: “We’re not even a third of the way there on the current eligible population. To now say to four million people, ‘OK, you’re eligible, too, but we’re nowhere near getting to you.’ It’s meaningless.” But again he acquiesced within days. All you had to do to qualify was assert that you had a health condition from a long list.

By mid-February, some three-fourths of New York’s adult population was eligible. But unless you were a government worker whose union received a dedicated allocation or had a special arrangement with providers, scheduling a vaccine appointment online was like betting a single number on a roulette wheel. An 80-year-old had no better odds than a 30-year-old Uber driver. New York now has administered the fewest shots per person to those over 65 in the Northeast and the seventh-lowest in the country, although its overall vaccination rate is higher than average.

Some argued that prioritizing “essential workers” would reduce virus cases. It didn’t. People are more likely to catch Covid at home or social gatherings than in an establishment or other workplaces, in part because of differences in mask use. Like most states in the Northeast, New York experienced an uptick in cases this spring as lockdowns were eased and people started socializing more. An antibody survey of New York City public workers last summer found that police, firefighters, teachers and child care workers were no more likely to have been infected than other city residents.

Yet when cases climbed this spring, a large number of seniors in New York still weren’t protected. As a result, hospitalizations and deaths in New York—especially in New York City, where seniors had to vie for vaccines with more “essential workers”—dropped much more slowly than in other states like California, Connecticut and Florida, all of which prioritized vaccinating seniors.

Connecticut’s Democratic Gov. Ned Lamont took heat for basing vaccine eligibility strictly on age, but that policy appears to have saved lives. Connecticut has fully vaccinated 78% of seniors, compared with 63% in New York. In December and January, Connecticut had 12% more deaths (adjusted for population) among residents over 65 than New York. But as more seniors got the shots, many fewer got sick and died in Connecticut. In February, senior deaths were 75% higher in New York than Connecticut; in March, deaths in New York were nearly four times as high.

Total deaths have also been about 50% lower in Connecticut than New York over the past two months. The Empire State was unfortunate to be the center of the early Covid outbreak. Its bad luck has been compounded by bad leadership."