The governor announced his stay-at-home order the next day, to take effect the night of March 22. The debate about whether he was already too late was already raging. Dr. Tom Frieden, a former CDC director, would tell the Times—in April—that shutting down a week or two earlier could have cut New York’s death toll by up to 80 percent (though as late as March 16 Frieden was still openly skeptical about the merits of closing schools).

Cuomo with his then-wife, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, and their daughters, Cara, Michaela, and Mariah. By Shawn Baldwin/AP.

Cuomo’s case for his choice of timing involves the art of politics just as much as the science of epidemiology. “You cannot move until people understand they have to move. You can’t proclaim anything here. All I have is moral suasion. That is hard on a mass basis,” he tells me. “You know, it’s an unsophisticated analysis: ‘If you proclaim it is so, they will do it.’ No, that’s not how any democracy works. There is no king. And it’s especially not how New York works. If I said to you, ‘We have to do this, California had a case’—who gives a goddamn that California had a case? California is totally the other end of the country. So until it was a reality here, why would people listen? ‘What are you talking about? You’re asking me to stay home? You’re uprooting my entire life? Because it happened in California?’ So when you’re dealing with an order that you have no capacity to enforce, where people could dismiss it immediately, you better be very careful, because if they dismiss you, you are now at a place where no one’s been before, where you have a metropolitan region where people are still going to be doing what they want to do, and you have no credibility and no way to enforce the rules. And now the viral infection will spread at a higher rate, and if it spreads at the higher rate, you will make Italy look like a picnic. Those are the calibrations—the public health need and public tolerance, the acceptance to have compliance. From March 1, after the first case [in New York], it was a very thoughtful plan of how to implement closedown procedures in a way that the public would accept without panic and would comply. Because I had set the table, we did it in 19 days.”

Cuomo’s claim to the fastest shutdown, counting from a state’s first case to when it announced a stay-at-home order, may be the wrong metric. As the virus spread globally in January and February, shouldn’t Cuomo have started preparing New Yorkers sooner? “The only rationale in January and February was it’s okay because it’s only China and it’s not going to come out of China, because China is doing a good job handling it, which is what everybody said. The president said, the CDC said, the WHO said,” Cuomo says. (On January 30, the WHO said “the outbreak constituted a Public Health Emergency of International Concern”; in February, the CDC said the virus would likely spread in the U.S.) “In a governor’s job, you don’t really do a lot of extensive analysis of international possible health pandemics. But it was just in China. As soon as it came out of China and then went to California and Seattle—I’m not a public health expert, but I know people get on planes. And once it came out of China, once it was in California, you knew it was just a matter of time.”

How Cuomo used that time will be endlessly second-guessed. In late February, after lobbying Vice President Mike Pence, Cuomo won FDA approval to use a state lab for New York’s coronavirus tests. Faced with mixed messages from the feds and doctors, Cuomo initially underestimated the local hazards of the pandemic. “We don’t even think it’s going to be as bad as it was in other countries,” he said on March 2. Eight days later, Cuomo began to gradually “tighten the valve” with a series of increasingly strict orders: creating a “containment area” when a virus cluster was identified in New Rochelle, then banning gatherings of more than 500 people, then closing bars and restaurants, and, on March 16, shutting down schools in the city, Westchester, and on Long Island. Still, as late as March 17, he told Errol Louis on NY1, “There’s not going to be any ‘you must stay in your house’ rule.”