FLASHBACK: Governor Cuomo says coronavirus hype was ‘hysteria and fear’

"I think part of this hysteria and fear is that people don’t believe the information they are getting or they have an overhyped belief of the danger of this virus," Cuomo said.

At the time, speaking to MSNBC, Cuomo was asked what he thought New York would be dealing with. "Are there solid scientific projections of what the city and the state should expect now that we have these two cases? How does a city as big as New York begin to calculate and notify the people the patients may have come into contact with?"

"You're exactly right, Chris," he said, "I think part of the issue here is we've been unrealistic in the expectation, right? We have a daily revelation, there's a new case here, there's a new case here, a community spread case. I've said from day one [which was two days prior], you look at the numbers, you look at the math. We're going to have dozens and dozens and dozens of cases in the state of New York. That's my expectation.

"Look how many people we had coming back from countries we now have on the watch list. Literally, hundreds, so there will be alot of cases. So I think the public, the calibration is off, the expectation is off. There's going to be many many cases, and every case you track down to limit the exposure the best you can. Testing capacity, we're trying to get our testing capacity up to 1,000 per day.

"Hospital capacity for those people who have to be hospitalized, but also the bottom line realization that 80 percent of the people will self-cure, self-resolve the virus, and the target problem, the 1.2 percent mortality, is senior citizens and people who have compromised immune systems and that's what we're focused on."

This was after the first case appeared in New York, which was from someone coming in from Iran. Writing in his expose Dumb and Dumber of how badly Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio handled the pandemic, Matt Palumbo quoted Cuomo as saying "'Everybody is doing exactly what we need to do,' Governor Cuomo said at a March 2 press conference. 'We have been ahead of this from Day 1' (which is an oddly cliche?d way of saying 'yesterday')."

In fact, Cuomo had said that there was a plan in place to make sure that everyone aboard the Iran plane was contacted. However, Palumbo writes, "Cuomo and de Blasio never addressed the plane or its passengers ever again—because no one bothered to do the work of tracking down those passengers. Local officials did request an investigation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), but they didn't perform one because they assumed the woman wasn't contagious."