STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. – With the coronavirus pandemic, all of us are in uncharted waters.

And that includes the government officials that we rely on.

We as the public expect our lawmakers to always have all the answers. To instantly rise to every challenge. To not only solve our problems and crises, but to have foreseen them, to have mitigated their effects before they even happen.

That’s never truer than when we’re going through what we’re going through now with the coronavirus pandemic.

We’ve rarely seen anything like this in U.S. history. There was the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed millions across the globe, including 1.5 million in the U.S. There were other influenza pandemics here in the late 1950s and the late 1960s.

It’s been a while since the country has had to deal with something like this.

And COVID-19 is yet more challenging, because it’s a new virus. There’s no vaccine as of yet, because you can’t develop a vaccine until you actually have the virus. And because it’s a new bug, none of us have any natural immunity against it.

So we’re really up against it. But just because we’re in a new world doesn’t mean that government can’t be responsive to its citizens.

New York has been hit like other places have been hit. Rumors ran rampant in the first few days. We looked to our lawmakers for guidance, for information, and for comfort.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have both risen to the occasion.

The two have been near-constant presences on television and on social media. They have held regular press conferences and have appeared on news programs, sometimes more than once a day. They have taken questions from reporters until there were no more questions to be asked.

Cuomo and de Blasio gave us all the information they had, and acknowledged when they didn’t have all the information at their fingertips. They have stepped forward and embraced their roles as the people that New Yorkers look to for leadership and guidance. They have accepted the responsibility that comes with their jobs.

Just as importantly, Cuomo and de Blasio have put their well-known political disputes aside. At least publicly. Now is not the time for political bickering.

Have their performances been perfect? No. They sometimes haven’t looked like they’re on the same page. Their separate press conference have meant that information is coming at us from two different sources. It took too long for City Hall to tell us how many virus sufferers there were in each borough. And there has been controversy over de Blasio’s decision to keep public schools open. That could backfire on the mayor.

Still, there has been a lot that’s positive about the overall performance of both executives.

The best way to tamp down panic is to give people as much information as you can. The more information, the less fear. The less fear, the less panic. Cuomo and de Blasio have done that.

You can’t say the same for President Donald Trump, who was slow to respond to the crisis, and who initially dismissed concerns about the potential impact of COVID-19. His first response was political, that the threat was being blown out of proportion by his Democratic opponents.

Totally wrong. It was only on Friday that Trump held the kind of full-blown press conference that we expect to see in the middle of a national crisis (even if it looked more like a parade of corporate plutocrats than an event aimed at inspiring fearful Americans).

Coronavirus has been a powerful reminder that these things can happen. America can be hit by a pandemic. Just in the way that we can be hit by natural disasters. Just in the way that we can be attacked by terrorists.

All our leaders must be ready whenever that bell rings.

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