A Recipe For Disaster

If there’s a lesson to learn this past week, as the novel coronavirus landed in Suffolk County, it’s that a lot of important organizations need to learn to better communicate in a crisis. Aeschylus said that “In war, truth is the first casualty”; that could be adapted, in the modern day, as: In a health emergency, only the truth will help prevent casualties.

Getting the truth was difficult in the past few days, even for news organizations. As news began to break of Suffolk County’s first COVID-19 patient — then word that the patient was at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital — there also was word that some students who had been studying overseas in the State University of New York would be quarantined upon return, at Stony Brook Southampton campus.

But Stony Brook Southampton Hospital officials had to defer to Stony Brook University. Which had to defer to SUNY. Which referred all inquiries to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office — notoriously unavailable to local media. (For fun, an email was sent to the governor’s press office contact email address on Saturday: “Is this even a real, active email?” There has never been a reply.)

Officials at all levels — U.S. Representative Lee Zeldin, State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. and Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman — have expressed frustration at the lack of reliable information being given to the public in a timely manner. That’s a clear recipe for disaster in a medical crisis, especially when media outlets dealing with reports of cases are left scrambling to report using sources and potentially present conflicting information, at a time when trustworthy facts are essential.

This is bad, and may get worse. But it won’t be the last time it happens. Every link in that chain — from the governor’s office down — must recognize this failure of duty and fix it. Next time, it could be that truth isn’t the only casualty that results.