The city Health Department missed early detection of COVID-19 because it listened to CDC bureaucrats — losing the chance to potentially spare untold numbers from death, a former agency director claims.
The department’s leadership decided to strictly adhere to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s rigid COVID-19 testing guidelines in early 2020, which delayed confirming the presence and transmission of the virus in the Big Apple by more than a month, writes Don Weiss in his new book, “Disease Detectives: True Stories of NYC Outbreaks.”
Weiss, a former “surveillance director” for the Big Apple’s Department of Health, was monitoring the situation from the trenches at the time.
He said he was frustrated by CDC guidelines that limited testing to suspected infected patients who returned to the US from Wuhan, China, and elsewhere overseas, exhibited severe lower respiratory illness or were exposed to a known case.
Many New Yorkers were only exhibiting mild, flu-like symptoms from COVID and would not be tested under the CDC criteria.
That meant they were potentially unaware that they had it — and more importantly, could infect others who were in poor health, immunocompromised or with serious pre-existing conditions or illness.
At a time without a vaccine, COVID turned into a death sentence for many elderly people and others with serious illness.
“I worried that we’d miss the opportunity to prevent an onslaught,” Weiss said in the book of the limited testing.
“By following the CDC’s strict criteria for testing we were missing cases. … The overwhelming probability favored mild cases arriving in NYC, but our hands felt tied.”
He said he and some others who tracked the disease wanted to test residents suspected of having even mild cases of COVID-19 to start a public health campaign sooner.
“But we were voted down and we stuck to CDC’s criteria. … We needed to go off the CDC script,” wrote Weiss, 67, who directed the city DOH’s surveillance unit for 22 years.
“It was a horrible place to be, wedged between the suspicion of cases and the inability to test them,” he said. “It was four weeks into the pandemic, and we still hadn’t identified a COVID-19 case in NYC, and the email to my colleagues imploring that we veer from CDC’s rigidity received zero response.”
He noted that Sharon Balter, a former department employee now working in the Los Angeles Health Department, was sending specimens to the CDC that didn’t meet the testing criteria because the Big Apple agency was still “stubbornly” trying to fight back.
The CDC had strict criteria for testing in part because of the limited ability to test, Weiss said.
On Jan. 29, 2020, a Brooklyn hospital reported a patient who was a ride-share driver in his late 40s who was very sick and on a ventilator. Tests for influenza and RSV were negative, but he wasn’t tested for COVID.
“Although the patient himself didn’t travel, he had exposure to travelers. … I was voted down and the patient wasn’t tested, well, not until several months later,” Weiss said.
It turned out that the ride-share driver had COVID. He had underlying ailments and died from COVID-related issues in May 2021.
Nearly 240 suspected COVID-19 cases were reported to the city’s Health Department before the first COVID case was confirmed March 1, 2020.
“COVID-19 was clearly circulating in NYC a month before the first recognized positive case,” Weiss wrote.
“The delay in testing capacity resulted in delayed recognition of the circular virus, which impaired the public health response until well after community transmission was established.”
Weiss, in a subsequent interview with The Post about his book, said, “There’s a possibility we would have saved lives” if COVID transmission had been detected sooner.
At the very least, residents could have been warned to quarantine and wear masks to protect themselves and others, he said.
Neither the CDC nor New York City Health Department responded to The Post’s requests for comment.
Weiss’s book also:
- Slammed then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s handling of the pandemic.
Weiss was enraged when de Blasio mentioned a child in The Bronx who tested positive for COVID-19 –revealing enough information that the kid was identified.
“The child became the target of abuse from classmates and the community. … We were outraged and vowed not to share any more information that could repeat the cruelty we witnessed,” Weiss wrote.
He told The Post that city Health Department staffers actually donated money to the student.
- Repeated previous criticism about what he described as the city’s eventual overreliance on testing and called its Test and Trace program an expensive bust.
“Contact tracing in NYC was ineffective at slowing transmission of COVID-19. Anyone who claims differently is putting lipstick on a pig,” Weiss said.
He said the screening of students at school for COVID-19 was also overused.
It’s fair to argue that it was appropriate to try different strategies to help tame a once-in-a-century pandemic, Weiss said.
“But the tenacity with which the city stuck with ineffective strategies can’t be justified,” he said. “We need to move toward a more tolerable balance of individual freedom and community protection.”
Data show 46,879 deaths in the city have been associated with COVID-19 and its variants since the original outbreak. There have been roughly 3.7 million total cases of COVID and 241,203 hospitalizations in the Big Apple.
Weiss retired in 2023 after being reassigned over he said was him calling out political correctness run amok.
