By Karen Rubin, News-Photos-Features.com
This is what MAGA Republican “governance” looks like.
Long Island now has the highest rate of coronavirus in New York State, and the state has one of the highest rates in the country.
Seeing the increases in COVID and the confluence with flu, heeding the calls for masking and vaxxing, Nassau Community College issued a mask mandate. Within minutes – minutes – Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman pressured the college, with 14,000 students, to rescind its mandate.
What kind of pressure did the County Executive put to bear over the college? Did he threaten to withhold funding?
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, closing out his first year in office, has proven himself great at cutting ribbons, holding pressers (while not actually answering questions) and photo ops, congratulating high school sports teams, hosting feel-good concerts, but crap at actually doing something to improve residents’ lives. Window dressing, but no actual leadership or governance.
Crime is up (31%), but apparently, he doesn’t consider hate crimes, fomented by the White Christo Nationalists who dominate his MAGA Republican party an issue, though Blakeman, who is himself Jewish, did announce increased security for synagogues after the New Jersey threat, making a great show with Orthodox Jews including Great Neck Village Mayor Pedram Bral.
Crime is up, but his focus? Overturning New York’s revamped gun laws banning guns from sensitive and high-trafficked areas. He is keen to have people arm themselves in schools, synagogues, on the LIRR, in public spaces. (But not government offices – the Executive Building looks like an armed encampment as he surrounds himself with security.) His concern for “public safety” extends to warning residents against the risk of Christmas tree fires and announcing Breast Cancer Awareness Week, Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and Fire Prevention Week.
That’s all the more relevant since real public threats - coronavirus, flu and RVS, even polio which has actually reemerged - are on the rise in Nassau County, at rates higher than New York City, highest in the state, and higher than the nation.
Long Island has the highest level of COVID-19 hospitalizations and new infections in the state, officials said this week, warning that the increase, coupled with current spikes in both influenza and RSV, could lead to a difficult winter. The level of coronavirus on Long island (December 16) was 41.31, higher even than New York City’s rate of 33.09 per 100k population (27.14 statewide); the percentage of positive test was 8.61% versus 6.45% in New York City (6.41% statewide). There were also four deaths – the highest single number – in the region.
Dr. Bruce Farber, chief of public health and epidemiology for Northwell Health, told Newsday it is vital for people to understand that being reinfected a second time with COVID-19 should be taken as seriously as a first infection. “There’s some data just coming out that suggests the rate of long COVID and complications is just as high with re infections as it was with the original infection. So I don't think people should have a false sense of security that if they had COVID once they are out of the woods because that’s not necessarily true at all.”
Governor Hochul is actively urging New Yorkers "to take advantage of all available tools to keep themselves, their loved ones and their communities safe and healthy. Stay up to date on vaccine doses, and test before gatherings or travel. If you test positive, talk to your doctor about potential treatment options" – a message being reinforced with a public information campaign. (Contact contact your local pharmacy, county health department, or healthcare provider; visit vaccines.gov; text your ZIPcode to 438829, or call 1-800-232-0233 to find nearby locations. For information about flu vaccine clinics, contact the local health department or visit vaccines.gov/find-vaccines/.) The state is also urging New Yorkers to get a polio vaccination.
The Biden administration also is pulling out all the stops to encourage people to get vaccinated or boosted and is also promoting the opportunity to enroll in Obamacare (nearly 5 million have already enrolled since the November 1 start), and make it easy to enroll at HealthCare.gov. Anyone who enrolls by December 15 can get full-year coverage that starts on January 1, 2023. Marketplace Open Enrollment runs through January 15, 2023.
Nassau Community College interim vice president for academic student services, Charmian Smith, took the CDC’s recommendation to heart when he announced earlier Friday that all students, staff and visitors, regardless of vaccination status, would be required to use face coverings while indoors on campus.
"The safety of the NCC community is of the utmost importance,” Smith said in a statement. “The CDC has elevated Nassau County's 'community level' risk of COVID-19 transmission to high and given this update the College is reinstating the Mandatory Mask Policy."
Minutes later Blakeman intervened.
But what is Blakeman doing to protect residents? Is Blakeman echoing the call to get vaccinations, boosted, wear masks, telling people where to go? Showing an example by getting the shot himself? Has he warned residents that even if they have already had COVID, they can get the new variant (so much for Trump’s ‘herd immunity’ strategy) and the dangers of long-term COVID? Is he reminding Nassau that the health insurance enrollment period is open? Of course not.
Blakeman is too interested in pretending all is well, all is normal. Well, the new “normal” is making pandemic precautions part of everyday life, not pretending, ostrich-like, that it does not exist.
Nassau’s new Health Commissioner (I suspect the previous long-time Health Commissioner either was fired or resigned because of being muzzled by Blakeman), Dr. Irina Gelman, at a Blakeman photo op (he gave the Ukraine Consul General a citation), said she would have to go back and review the statistics (???) but that COVID, flu and RSV rates are up everywhere (it’s the winter holidays, after all) and that increases reflect more testing (??). But she did not mention any actual effort to urge County residents to get boosted, vaxed, or wear masks in public settings.
Instead, Blakeman is mining the resentment from segments of the county – such as Orthodox Jews – for the quarantine, mask and vaccination mandates imposed by Democratic governor and county executive at the start of the coronavirus, when New York was at the epicenter of the pandemic and COVID was killing 2 million Americans, and they were barred from gathering in groups larger than 25 (a mandate they continually ignored).
Another issue that poses a threat to Nassau County is cyberattacks and ransomware such as have debilitated Suffolk County. Blakeman’s solution is to hire a contractor, presumably to evaluate vulnerabilities.
Despite the steady drumbeat of new revelations concerning Suffolk County’s catastrophic cyberattack, the Republican majority on the Legislature has yet to act on two proposals by Legislator Siela A. Bynoe (D-Westbury): to establish a separate, internal cybersecurity administrator and team within the Nassau County Department of Information Technology to focus on strengthening the County’s systems and developing recovery protocols in the event of an attack and to direct the Department of Consumer Affairs to give any future victims resources that they can use to protect their credit and alert the major credit bureaus of the exposure.
But Blakeman has basically frozen out Democrats from any actual deliberation for the betterment of the county – as in the pseudo “bipartisan” “independent” redistricting committee.
And by the way, Governor Kathy Hochul back in February established a Joint Security Operations Center in Brooklyn to serve as a nerve center for joint local, state and federal cyber efforts, including data collection, response efforts and information sharing. The JSOC, the nation's first-of-its-kind cyber command center, provide a statewide view of the cyber-threat landscape and improves coordination on threat intelligence and incident response. The Governor also proposed a $30 million "shared services" program to help local governments and other regional partners acquire and deploy high quality cybersecurity services to bolster their cyber defenses.
Has Nassau County sought out this expertise and assistance?
So far, Blakeman has spent 98% of his time and effort on purely ceremonial things, maybe 2% on policy or actions that actually benefit Nassau County, improve people’s lives.
This week, he held another presser, with Ukraine, which turned out to be him awarding a citation (?) to Oleksii Holubov, Ukraine Consul General. I expected him to announce a coordinated effort to collect items to help Ukrainians weather the frigid winter in face of the destruction of their infrastructure by Russia’s criminal war, except for some mention of the Marines’ Toys for Tots program. And some mention of a Franklin Center gun dealer who collected 60 guns earlier this year. (Why not a campaign to collect assault weapons from those who have them - at least that would get some of these weapons of war out of civilian hands and on the battlefield where they belong?)
Among the Republicans on hand for the Ukraine photo op, the Republican Congressman-elect George Santos, who responded to a question about his Republican House leadership threatening to withhold aid to Ukraine, saying, “We don’t agree on everything in my caucus.”
(Santos, btw, was at the January 6 rally at the Ellipse, contributed support to jailed rioters, and joined the New York Young Republicans gala headlined by the QAnon Seditionist Pro-Putin Marjorie Taylor Greene and the White Supremacist Neo-Nazi Antisemite Jack Posobiec.)
Blakeman ignores any proposal that comes from the Democrats and surrounds himself with Republicans and supporters, making no effort whatsoever to engage the representatives of more than half the county.
Hardly a way to effectively govern. Hardly leadership. And with Republicans poised to gerrymander a supermajority on the county Legislature, that is the way it will be for a decade, at least.
(Requests for comment from Blakeman and Dr. Gelman concerning the County’s COVID efforts were not answered.)
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