This archive report was first published on 5 August 2020.
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread in New York City in March 2020, officials inside the health department talked about quitting or staging a walkout to force action. The mayor and top officials eventually agreed on the need to lock down the city to stop the spread of the virus, with schools closed on March 15.
However, the health department's response was not without controversy. Some officials blamed Dr. Oxiris Barbot, the health commissioner, for delays and confusion in the city's response, citing her shifting public statements on the virus from late January to early March. In early April, a few elected officials called for her to be fired.
The turmoil at the top of the city's health agency worsened in May over the mayor's decision to locate the city's contact-tracing efforts within its public hospital system and not in the health department.
Under Health + Hospitals, the city's contact-tracing program got off to a rocky start, with the city outsourcing much of the day-to-day management of the call center to Optum, a billion-dollar subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group. As of July 2020, fewer than half of New Yorkers who had tested positive for the coronavirus had shared their contacts, with some 20,000 people testing positive since the program began on June 1.
“Right now, cases are popping up all over the place and we are not linking them to known contacts except in a small proportion of cases,” Dr. Neil Vora, the director of the trace effort, said at an internal town-hall-style meeting for tracers last month.
