How the Smallest State Engineered a Big Covid Comeback When Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo realized that Washington wasn't going to be much help, she called CVS, Salesforce—and the bishop. https://www.politico.com/news/magaz...-interview-rhode-island-governor-covid-353799 Rhode Island is once again open for business. You can go to the movies, to restaurants, to the beach, even to indoor concerts, although crowd sizes are capped at 125 spectators, and masks remain mandatory throughout the state. Day care centers, museums and bars are open, too; you can’t actually belly up to the bar, but you can get served at your seat. Life hasn’t yet returned to normal in America’s smallest state, but it’s at least no longer crazy to think about life returning to normal, because coronavirus deaths, hospitalizations and infections have been plummeting since April. Rhode Island is leading the nation in testing, with nearly a quarter of its population tested so far, and its rate of positive tests has dropped from over 18 percent to under 2 percent. While a national debate rages over school schedules, weighing concerns about education and convenience against concerns about safety, Governor Gina Raimondo has already announced that classrooms will reopen this fall—not because parents have no other child care options, or because President Donald Trump is insisting there’s nothing to worry about, but because she's confident Rhode Island can do it safely. It is a testament to the viciousness of the virus that Rhode Island can be seen as a success story despite the deaths of nearly 1,000 of its citizens, or nearly 0.1 percent of its population. It was a uniquely vulnerable state, featuring the nation’s second-densest and ninth-oldest population, nestled between the pandemic hot spots of New York City and Boston. Rhode Island was hit early and hard by the outbreak. But now, while COVID-19 is still winning in much of America, with infections on the rise and outbreaks in states like Florida, Texas and Arizona, forcing reversals of some efforts to reopen economies, Raimondo and her public health team have beat back the pandemic in Rhode Island. It is now one of only four U.S. states rated a “low” risk level by the Covid Act Now project. So how did Rhode Island do it? The short answer is Raimondo copied the playbook of nations like South Korea and New Zealand that have fared much better than the United States in battling the virus—intensive testing, tracing and isolation plus wear-your-damn-mask policy and messaging—while adding innovative twists through uniquely American public-private partnerships. It doesn’t hurt that Rhode Island is home to drugstore giant CVS, which is also the state’s largest employer; in part through help from the company, more than 25 percent of Rhode Islanders have been tested, many of them barbers, grocery clerks and other public-facing workers with no symptoms. She persuaded Salesforce to develop a state-of-the-art contact tracing app for Rhode Island for free, while working with Infosys on a location tracking feature and SurveyMonkey on symptom monitoring. Brown University has provided dorms for health care workers who want to remain isolated from their families. Raimondo was also one of the first governors to shut down schools and businesses, ban large businesses and require masks. Basically, it’s worked. Deaths have plunged from more than 20 per day to fewer than five, infections from more than 400 per day to fewer than 50, and there’s plenty of room in the state’s intensive care units. Raimondo, a centrist Democrat who has received a bit of buzz as a possible running mate for Joe Biden, has a legitimate story to tell about leadership in a crisis. When Raimondo spoke with POLITICO Magazine’s Miami-based senior writer Michael Grunwald about her approach to the emergency, however, she talked just as much about lack of leadership, specifically Trump's hands-off happy-talk approach. Raimondo isn’t known as a political grandstander or a hard-edged partisan; her signature issue before COVID was an unsexy and unpopular pension reform, and she spoke warmly about her cooperation with like-minded Republican governors like Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Larry Hogan of Maryland. She’s really angry at Trump, though. And if Rhode Island’s trajectory illustrates the power of state leadership driven by data, science and common sense, its death toll illustrates the limits of what states can achieve without help from the federal government. Raimondo spoke to POLITICO shortly after she announced a mandatory two-week quarantine for visitors from high-risk states. This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity. MICHAEL GRUNWALD: I had hoped to do this interview in person, but you won’t let me come up from Florida. GINA RAIMONDO: You can come, but we’ll lock you up in a room. MG: Florida’s positive test rate is over 15 percent, and Rhode Island’s is under 2 percent. Why have you done so much better than us? GR: It’s not magic. It’s just good execution. We got on it right away, and just took it very seriously from the get-go. MG: You definitely bent the curve. But before we talk about all the cool stuff you did, you also had a thousand deaths. GR: Almost a thousand, and we’re still losing people every single day. I’m still doing press conferences about this, and it hurts to have to say, we’ve lost more Rhode Islanders today. The majority are folks who were in nursing homes and assisted living, with underlying health conditions. But it’s really tough. MG: Is there anything you regret, anything that in retrospect you wish you had done earlier? GR: You know, I ask myself that all that time. We were very quick to shut down visitation to nursing homes, and that was a life saver. But if I had to do it over, if I knew then what I knew now, I would’ve shut down restaurants and retail even sooner. And in the very beginning, the first few days, we did have some Covid-positive folks discharged from hospitals to nursing homes, and of course we don’t do that anymore. Now we cohort all the Covid patients into the same nursing home. MG: When did you realize that this would be such a defining moment? GR: Our first few cases, I’ll be honest, it wasn’t immediately apparent to me that this would be the absolute defining moment. I remember the first few press conferences in the first week of March, saying we still don’t have widespread community transmission, it’s still OK to go out for dinner. I went out for dinner on a Monday night [March 9] but by Wednesday or Thursday, it became very clear to me that I needed to shut it all down. On March 13, I made the decision to close school. That was big. That was my “oh, crap” moment. You don’t do something that disruptive lightly. Then I closed the restaurants. We got religion fast. MG: There have been a lot of good results in foreign countries—in South Korea, in Taiwan, in New Zealand. They did massive testing, tracing, isolation. Did you essentially adopt that model? GR: Absolutely. You know, this entire crisis would have played out so differently with leadership and a national plan from the federal government. If the Trump administration in January had started to stockpile PPE [personal protective equipment], get serious about testing, put together a plan, we would have far fewer deaths, far fewer people out of work, far fewer sick people. Those first couple weeks of March, when we still weren’t certain how bad it would be, we were getting zero direction or guidance from the federal government. That’s when I took it on myself to dive in deeply. To figure out what’s going on in South Korea, in Singapore, in Europe, in China—like, immediately. I had this moment of clarity very early on, at 2 a.m. while I was working in my house alone: There’s no way you can outrun this thing. You have to stay a step ahead. That’s when we said we need aggressive testing, very aggressive contact tracing and social distancing. We came to that realization earlier than some other places, because it seemed like the only way to keep a lid on the virus. Otherwise, we could see it would outrun us and we’d never be able to catch up. (More at above url)