The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

by Lawrence Wright

Insurrection was afoot. There was talk of delivering an ultimatum to the mayor: “Either pivot to pandemic planning today or they start to deal with a health department that won’t follow his orders.” Mayor Bill de Blasio was under the spell of an email from Mitchell Katz, the CEO of New York’s sprawling municipal healthcare system, who counseled the mayor to keep the city open. “Canceling large gatherings gives people the wrong impression of this illness,” Katz wrote. “If it is not safe to go to a conference, why is it safe to go to the hospital or ride in the subway?” He argued, on the one hand, that the “terrible problem” in Italy was unlikely to happen in New York and, on the other, that many New Yorkers were going to get infected anyway. “Greater than 99 percent will recover without harm. Once people recover they will have immunity. The immunity will protect the herd.” The mayor then went on Morning Joe and said a number of things he would soon regret, starting with his pledge to keep the schools open, even if students fell ill. “If you’re under fifty and you’re healthy, which is most New Yorkers, there’s very little threat here.”