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Was Your State Ahead of the Coronavirus Curve?

These are the governors who got in front of the crisis — and the ones who fell behind.

Credit...Illustration by Nicholas Konrad; photographs by Benjamin Norman for The New York Times, Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press, and Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press

Mr. Bokat-Lindell is a writer in The New York Times Opinion section.

This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it Tuesdays and Thursdays.

On Wednesday, Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, argued in a Times Op-Ed that too much attention is being paid to how the president is handling the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, people should be focusing on their governors: “Some are showing their competence and leadership, while others are revealing their shortcomings,” she wrote.

Ms. Haley was not so impolitic as to name names, but plenty of other people have. Which governors are leading the response to the coronavirus, and which ones are trailing the pack? Here’s what journalists, public-health experts and others are saying.

Mr. Newsom was the first governor in the nation to issue a stay-at-home order, which may have helped California avoid a New York-level outbreak, according to The Los Angeles Times. His “bold, early pushes for social distancing appear to have paid off immensely,” Farhad Manjoo, a New York Times columnist, writes. “The Bay Area, where I live, reported some of the first ‘community spread’ coronavirus cases in the country. Now the region is leading the nation in ‘flattening the curve.’” Most recently, Mr. Newsom has earned praise for reportedly securing a monthly supply of 200 million N95 respiratory and surgical masks, some of which California may export to other hard-hit states.

Mr. DeWine’s past few weeks have been defined by a willingness to make unpopular decisions: On March 12, even though Ohio had yet to suffer a major coronavirus outbreak, he called for the statewide closing of public schools — the first governor to do so. He also postponed Ohio’s presidential primary election in defiance of a court ruling. “Perhaps no single governor has done more to put the nation on a war footing in the fight against coronavirus than DeWine,” Bill Scher writes in Politico.

Mr. Inslee had the misfortune of presiding over the state where the coronavirus happened to claim its first American life, on Feb. 29. But Mr. Inslee responded that same day by declaring a state of emergency, the first governor to do so. Partly as a result of his swift response, Washington’s epidemic curve is the flattest of any state with more than 25 deaths. “This is what competence looks like: not some faux-macho media hound going on television a lot, but careful, agile governance informed by the best available information,” Ryan Cooper writes for The Week. “Inslee may not get such an approval bump from role-playing as the Important Leader, but his quick work saved thousands of lives.”

Mr. Beshear — an abortion-rights-supporting, same-sex marriage-defending Democrat — was never supposed to win last year’s election in deep-red Kentucky, which makes his decisive handling of the coronavirus all the more remarkable, Ryan Grim writes at The Intercept. After the state’s first coronavirus case was reported on March 6, Mr. Beshear immediately declared a state of emergency, a day before New York State did. He followed up by closing schools and asking churches to cancel worship services. (He’s also inspired a lot of memes.)

Mr. Hogan has been one of the most decisive and aggressive governors in fighting the pandemic, according to The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin. She writes that the governor, a sober executive, communicated early the seriousness of the threat and the urgency of social distancing to his constituents without sparking panic. He’s also managed to publicly criticize the federal government’s response — one of the few elected Republicans to do so — without crossing the tripwire of the president’s ego.

Mr. Cuomo has emerged as something of a national hero during the pandemic, as The Times’s media columnist Ben Smith has observed, offering concerned citizens a foil to the president onto which fantasies of capable and compassionate leadership can be projected. “To the surprise of many who did not associate the name ‘Andrew Cuomo’ with the word ‘empathy,’ ” The Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes, “the governor has become a sort of national shrink, talking us through our fear, our loss and our growing stir-craziness.” Mara Gay, a member of The Times’s editorial board, tweeted:

But Ms. Gay is also among the many who have criticized Mr. Cuomo for not doing more to reduce crowding in the state’s jails, which the New York City jail system’s chief physician called a “public health disaster.” And on Wednesday, The Times published a report showing that the perception of Mr. Cuomo’s competence has at times exceeded the fact of it: New York’s initial response to the virus was hampered by complacency, political infighting, delays and dysfunction, which is partly why the state now has more confirmed cases than any country outside the United States. Nikole Hannah-Jones, a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, tweeted:

Although Ms. Whitmer issued a stay-at-home order around the same time as most of her neighboring governors, it came when Michigan had far more cases than other states in the Great Lakes region. That relative delay could partly explain why Michigan now faces the third worst outbreak in the country, according to public-health experts who spoke to Bridge Magazine. But they also said that other factors, including bad luck, might be at play. As Malaika Jabali writes at The Intercept, Ms. Whitmer was an early critic of the federal government’s lack of preparedness, but has been less fortunate than Mr. Hogan in escaping the president’s ire.

Florida has one of the nation’s largest populations of people over 65, which means the state is especially vulnerable to the coronavirus. Yet for weeks Mr. DeSantis defied calls to shut down beaches teeming with spring breakers, many of whom most likely contracted the virus before scattering across the country. The governor finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1 — but it was far too late, according to The Times columnist David Leonhardt.

No state is more vulnerable to this pandemic than Mississippi, which leads the country in nearly every underlying condition that makes people especially susceptible to dying from Covid-19, Bob Moser writes in The New Yorker. The racial disparities in coronavirus case numbers and deaths are also particularly salient in Mississippi, whose population has a higher proportion of black people than any other state’s.

But when local officials tried to control the virus’s spread in March by restricting public gatherings, Mr. Reeves undermined them by declaring most businesses in the state “essential” and therefore exempt. Only on April 3 did a statewide shelter-in-place order go into effect. “When the caseload in Mississippi explodes, he will bear the responsibility for it due to this ignominious action,” Alvin Tillery Jr., a political-science professor at Northwestern University, told NBC.

Brian Kemp waited until April 2 to issue a stay-at-home order, in part, he said, because he had only just learned that asymptomatic carriers of the coronavirus could transmit it. As CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, told Anderson Cooper, public-health officials and scientists have been warning about asymptomatic transmission since January.

On March 14, a day after President Trump declared a national emergency, Mr. Stitt tweeted a photo of his family eating at a restaurant with the caption: “It’s packed tonight!” After receiving blowback, the governor deleted the tweet and declared a state of emergency the next day. But Mr. Stitt still hasn’t issued a statewide stay-at-home order, leaving it up to local officials, such as Tulsa’s mayor, to enact piecemeal restrictions.

Texas has the second-largest and most uninsured population in the country — which is precisely why Mr. Abbott’s lethargic response to the coronavirus has been so disappointing, according to Asher Hildebrand, a public policy professor at Duke University. “Abbott has been behind the curve in nearly every protective measure — declaring a state of emergency, activating the National Guard, ramping up testing capacity, closing bars and restaurants,” he told NBC.

On March 26, a reporter asked Kay Ivey if she would follow the 21 other governors who had by that time issued stay-at-home orders. She said, “Y’all, we are not Louisiana, we are not New York State, we are not California.” But a stay-at-home order did finally go into effect on Saturday after all, raising questions about whether Alabama had become Louisiana, New York or California over the weekend.

Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter.


“Trump’s Not the Only World Leader Bungling Coronavirus” [Bloomberg]

“Three reasons why Jacinda Ardern’s coronavirus response has been a masterclass in crisis leadership” [The Conversation]

“These countries are doing the best and worst jobs fighting coronavirus” [USA Today]

“South Korea shows that democracies can succeed against the coronavirus” [The Washington Post]

“Germany Has Relatively Few Deaths From Coronavirus. Why?” [The New York Times]


Here’s what readers had to say about the last debate: When will there be a treatment for the coronavirus?

Readers wrote in to note two other potentially promising drugs that are undergoing clinical trials: Leronlimab, a monoclonal antibody developed to treat H.I.V., and recombinant interferon alfa-2b, a protein that functions as an immune system messenger.

Spencer Bokat-Lindell is a writer for the Opinion section. @bokatlindell

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