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Healthcare Heroes: Fighting AIDS and COVID-19.
New York State Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s fierce and focused fight to find enough hospital beds to combat the Corona Virus pandemic ripping through NYC and State, is not the first time a Governor of NY named Cuomo became a healthcare hero, grappling with a great public health crisis.
“I don’t want the hallways of hospitals to be overflowing with COVID-19 patients on gurneys,” Andrew Cuomo said, at an Albany press briefing last week, describing the nightmare medical scenario we experienced with AIDS patients in the 1980’s when his father, Mario Cuomo was NY’s Governor.
With the HIV virus that caused AIDS being discovered only four years earlier, I walked the hallways of public hospitals in NYC with Mario Cuomo and his State Health Commissioner Dr. David Axelrod in 1985, to see first hand just how bad things were. Gurney after gurney was gridlocked, one behind the other like shopping carts waiting for Costco to open during these days of COVID-19. Each portable hospital bed on wheels was occupied by a gaunt, gay man, curled in a fetal position, bedsheet pulled tightly under his chin. When a nurse or doctor came through, we had to move sideways to create enough space for all of us.
Dr. Axelrod, a Harvard-educated infectious disease scientist who worked at the National Institutes of Health before coming to NYS’ Health…
