Fearless City: Postscript

Andy 'n' Chris: "Look how serious we are! Awesome!" But a little smile on Cuomo's lips as he contemplates the captive press, paying him attention but unable to ask him a single question about his role in Albany's corruption and secrecy. Photo by Katie Orlinsky/New York Times.

Not that fearless. I guess I spoke too soon.

Friday started off pretty well, with New York as a whole resolutely refusing to panic and Mayor de Blasio and city health commissioner Mary Bassett keeping things that way, as our own Ebola victim, Dr. Craig Spencer, remained in stable condition:

To prove the point that New York City's subway isn't infected with Ebola, Mayor Bill de Blasio did what a politician must: He rode it himself this morning.... [T]wo facts — a New Yorker has Ebola, and he rode the subway — conjure worst-case scenarios of how any contagious disease might quickly spread in the densest city in the United States. De Blasio, repeatedly photographed with a smile on his face and a cup of coffee in hand, is right, though, that there's not that much to fear here. 

Then there was some asshole at The New Republic called Noam Scheiber who doesn't know how to spell "minuscule", trolling the situation:

Among the many accurate pieces of information that Governor Andrew Cuomo, Mayor Bill de Blasio, and city Health Commissioner Mary Bassett disseminated to the public was the following whopper: That Dr. Spencer acted entirely appropriately and responsibly....

This is clearly not true. Despite the fact that Dr. Spencer presented a miniscule risk to anyone around him when he decided to ride the subway, go bowling, and frolic at the High Line Park on Wednesday, he obviously should not have been out and about. 

Since the risk was not in fact minuscule but zero, and Spencer was following the requisite protocol of taking his temperature twice a day and checked himself into the hospital the instant the thermometer showed a fever, no. The irresponsible parties were the ones who (successfully) demanded the closing and fumigation of more or less every venue Dr. Spencer had looked at, even though they knew there was no medical reason to do it, making it look as if the panicked were in the right (as Scheiber knows too; as I say, he's just a troll, and fortunately it's been decades since anybody not in the business actually read The New Republic). Most New Yorkers understood this very well, and rode on the 1 train as usual. MSNBC's Chris Hayes wanted to do better than that

Literally making plans right now w/ friends from high school to go to bowl at the Gutter...
— Christopher Hayes (@chrislhayes) October 24, 2014

but the bowling alley had been closed, of course, by more fearmongering.

By evening, though, Cuomo had received a call from his partner in pusillanimity, the governor across the river, and Christie had an idea: Let's panic after all, so we can be photographed looking very serious and stern, and make de Blasio look feckless:

The governors ordered quarantines for all people entering the country through Newark Liberty and Kennedy International Airport if they had direct contact with Ebola patients in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The announcement signaled an immediate shift in mood, since public officials had gone to great lengths to ease public anxiety after a New York City doctor received a diagnosis of Ebola on Thursday.

That's right. Now public anxiety is the order of the day, and if you volunteer to help care for Ebola sufferers in West Africa you're going to be punished with three weeks of solitary confinement. "That fight has to be won," de Blasio said of the Médecins Sans Frontières volunteers, and "for the good of all Americans, they have to succeed." So let's make it as difficult for them as possible, governors.

And now Cuomo really is telling lies about Dr. Spencer:

Mr. Cuomo’s remarks at times veered beyond the facts, as when he criticized the New York patient with Ebola, Dr. Craig Spencer, accusing him of having failed to follow the protocols set by his organization, Doctors Without Borders.

“He’s a doctor, and even he didn’t follow the guidelines for the quarantine, let’s be honest,” Mr. Cuomo said. In fact, Doctors Without Borders said, Dr. Spencer had followed its guidelines. And he was not under quarantine.

(Earlier in the day, Dr. Bassett, the health commissioner, said in an interview that Dr. Spencer had “handled himself really well,” adding, “I don’t want anyone portraying him as reckless.”)

Yeah, let's be honest, Governor. Though if you're really serious about it I think you probably need to sign up for some lessons, because you're doing it wrong.

Update: Dickheads in Newark carrying out Cuomo-Christie policy, and maybe even more stupid and needlessly offensive than I expected:

A nurse who tested negative for the Ebola virus but remained under a 21-day quarantine in a Newark hospital on Saturday is angry and frustrated with how she was treated when she returned to the United States from West Africa.

A first-person account by the nurse, Kaci Hickox, of what happened when she landed at Newark Liberty International Airport about 1 p.m. Fridaywas published on Saturday on the website of The Dallas Morning News.

Ms. Hickox’s mother, Karen Hickox, said her daughter called her Saturday morning, crying in frustration at being held in a tent at the hospital without being told when she could leave.

“She’s lived in Burma, Sudan, Uganda and Nigeria, and she’s worked for Doctors Without Borders many times,” Ms. Hickox said in a telephone interview Saturday from her home outside Dallas. “I think the frustration is that she went and did her good deed and her passion and her serving spirit, and she comes back to America and I just don’t feel they were very welcoming.”

Way different from Dallas (thanks, actor212), New York was perfectly prepared and handling everything by the book—except for the governors, unfortunately.