STAT As Covid-19 has receded from everyday life, New Yorkers — and Americans more generally — haven’t shown much interest in poring over their governments’ pandemic-era performance. In 2024, congressional Republicans released a deeply partisan Covid-19 report, focused on issues like the lab-leak origin theory. But there has been little neutral analysis of real-time policy decisions aimed at truly learning what worked, what didn’t, and what if. The U.K., by contrast, set up a Covid inquiry in June 2022 so that, as a nation, it is better prepared next time.
While the federal government seems unlikely to ever dig into Covid in a substantive way, states can still review their role and what they could have done better. That is particularly true for my home state, New York, whose governor at the time, Andrew Cuomo, is now running for New York City mayor and is still defending his handling of the state’s pandemic response.