It has been standard operating procedure for the mainstream media to bow at the feet of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) over his allegedly brilliant handling of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak in his state. He’s on his brother Chris’s program on CNN often each week for fluffy segments on how things are going, with questions peppered in about his possible future political ambitions.

Liberal and Never Trumper columnists like Jennifer Rubin have swooned over his supposed magnificent “leadership”, emphatically declaring that he is miles ahead of President Trump when it comes to steering his ship away from danger.

But a new report published by the New York Times confirms what a lot of us have long suspected about the virus’s spread across the United States – namely that New York City was the “primary gateway.” Furthermore, we also learn that the reason why stems largely from early leadership failures by NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo:

New York City’s coronavirus outbreak grew so large by early March that the city became the primary source of new infections in the United States, new research reveals, as thousands of infected people traveled from the city and seeded outbreaks around the country.

The research indicates that a wave of infections swept from New York City through much of the country before the city began setting social distancing limits to stop the growth. That helped to fuel outbreaks in Louisiana, Texas, Arizona and as far away as the West Coast.

[…]

“We now have enough data to feel pretty confident that New York was the primary gateway for the rest of the country,” said Nathan Grubaugh, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health.

The central role of New York’s outbreak shows that decisions made by state and federal officials — including waiting to impose distancing measures and to limit international flights — helped shape the trajectory of the outbreak and allowed it to grow in the rest of the country.

[…]

During crucial weeks in March, New York’s political leaders waited to take aggressive action, even after identifying hundreds of cases, giving the virus a head start. And by mid-March, when President Trump restricted travel from Europe, the restrictions were essentially pointless, the data suggest, as the disease was already spreading widely within the country.

Predictably, Gov. Cuomo’s office is blaming Trump:

Dani Lever, communications director for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, criticized federal authorities, describing an “enormous failure by the federal government to leave New York and the East Coast exposed to flights from Europe, while at the same time instilling a false sense of security by telling the State of New York that we had no Covid cases throughout the entire month of February.”

Right, because it’s the Trump administration’s fault that de Blasio and Cuomo and other Democratic officials in the state were telling people in February and early March to act like normal New Yorkers and go about their business, and by the way, make sure to attend parades and visit Chinatown because COEXIST and stuff.

This research is a brutal, damning indictment of Cuomo’s and de Blasio’s failed leadership, which most of the national media outside of the New York Times have – to date – largely and deliberately avoided focusing on.

My RedState colleague Bonchie hit the nail on the head:

So it turns out New York seeded most of the outbreaks throughout the country. And what was Gov. Cuomo doing at the time? Threatening to sue other states if they make NYers quarantine after traveling from the epicenter. Yet, he's still being praised despite his massive failures.

— Bonchie (@bonchieredstate) May 7, 2020

Yep. The truth is out now, laid bare for all to see. But Orange Man Bad and all that so don’t look for most of the media to zero in on this information because they’ve got bigger fish to fry.

Related –>> Ted Cruz Offers Some Timely Advice for Gov. Andrew Cuomo After His Order to Clean Dirty NYC Subways