In June, Bill Hammond, the Empire Center’s senior fellow for health policy, wrote a withering review of the Olson Group’s assessment of the state’s COVID response.
When Capital Tonight asked Hammond if the state was ready for another COVID-like event, he said, “I have my doubts, because we haven’t had any kind of reckoning with what happened.”
Just last week, New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli echoed that opinion in an op-ed published by the Albany Times Union, while listing some of the same mistakes and omissions in the Olson Report, and calling for an independent legislative review of the state’s COVID response.
“In terms of the adequacy of (the Olson Group’s report), the independence of it, it just wasn’t there. It was sloppy and there were a lot of errors,” DiNapoli told Capital Tonight. “This was a big, big disappointment.”
The comptroller says he feels it’s important to push for the legislature to have subpoena power to compel testimony from unwilling witnesses.
“We can’t move on yet, and that really leaves that other option out there, of that independent commission. I think it can be independent, even though it may involve the legislature and folks that were office when this happened,” he said.
Asked about the Olson report in June, Gov. Kathy Hochul said, “We knew that things had to be done differently, they had to be done better and we had to prepare for the possibility that this would happen again.”
While acknowledging that the report was good to have, the governor noted that because of the report’s delay, the Hochul administration had already implemented several dozen “After Action Reports” to ensure New York is ready for another possible pandemic. The governor also specifically mentioned an increase in funding for the state Office of Emergency Management and a $1.7 billion investment in a new research lab.
Other steps taken by the state to address another possible pandemic include continuing to maintain the state’s emergency stockpiles and creating a new Public Health Risk Communication Course with Cornell University.
Among the steps the state is expecting to take soon are funding pandemic response training programs through the Office of Emergency Management and continuing to improve health care system coordination through DOH’s surge and flex planning.
When asked about the changes, DiNapoli acknowledged them as positive steps, but said it’s not enough.
“We don’t have a clear analysis about what went wrong about some of the decisions that were being made, particularly in terms of accounting for nursing home deaths, decisions about having COVID patients be located in nursing homes along with people who did not have COVID…which contributed, obviously, to the number of deaths that occurred.”
Neither the Assembly nor Senate Democratic conferences have any plans to create an independent legislative commission with subpoena power according to their two spokesmen.
The Assembly Republican conference, which has repeatedly called for the legislature to use its subpoena power to investigate the full scope of what happened during the COVID pandemic, sent Capital Tonight the following statement attributed to Assembly Minority Leader Will Barclay:
“Not only did the Cuomo administration severely mishandle the pandemic, but it misled the public by massively undercounting nursing home deaths resulting from Cuomo’s directive. The sheer lack of order, transparency and accountability that ensued at such a vulnerable time was shameful; 15,000 COVID deaths took place in long-term care facilities during the pandemic. Their loved ones deserve closure and answers from state officials who made poor decisions. We are destined to repeat the errors of the past if we do not actively seek to learn from the decisions made during the pandemic. This is as much about seeking the truth as it is about learning from the mistakes made during the pandemic.”