A bombshell Empire Center report reveals that COVID hit New York far earlier and harder than was first reported — with the city suffering one of the deadliest peaks “of the entire global pandemic.”

That makes ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s claims to great leadership during COVID even more laughable.

“By the yardstick that matters most — the number of lives lost — New York’s response was not merely sub-par or below average, but among the least effective in the world,” notes Bill Hammond, the report’s author.

New modeling by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation shows the first COVID wave had peaked by the time Cuomo (and his squabble-mate, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio) switched from “nothing to worry about” to “lock everything down.”

And other research shows the first now-known COVID death in New York as coming in the last week of January 2020.

The institute’s work finds that wider COVID spread began early that February, and the infection rate likely peaked around March 19, three weeks earlier than previously believed, “an insight that might have significantly changed how officials handled the crisis,” notes Hammond.

Doubly sickening, Cuomo’s deadly March 25 order requiring nursing homes to readmit infected patients was unnecessary because hospitals weren’t going to be overwhelmed.

Indeed, you may recall that the 1,000-bed hospital ship USNS Comfort and Javits Center’s 2,500 beds wound up hosting fewer than 700 patients combined.

The Comfort left Pier 90 on April 30, 2020 — about a month after arriving on its mission to alleviate the burden on local hospitals — because it proved needless.

To be fair, the blame here goes much further: Cuomo was operating off state data on COVID tests, which seemed to show a much later peak.

But that was an artifact of testing becoming much more available because federal bureaucrats initially banned the use of any COVID tests but one they’d designed — which turned out not to work.

New York’s then-leaders still bear great blame because they didn’t probe to truly understand the data — and instead rushed to take drastic action, closing the barn door (and the state economy) after the horse had already left.

For months, Cuomo basked in the love of the media (which were simultaneously clamping down on seasoned epidemiologists and virologists who questioned the lockdowns) for his daily press conferences, so different from the president’s.

Then he scored a $5 million book contract to brag about his “leadership,” devoting his time (and, illegally, staff resources) to the project even as his lockdowns continued.

Thanks to Cuomo (and the successor he chose, now-Gov. Kathy Hochul), New York’s lockdown and school closures lasted far longer than those in most of the nation.

As a result, the state economy is recovering far more slowly than early-reopening states’, while millions of public-school kids suffer from historic learning-loss.

Worse, Hammond notes, the metro area’s COVID death toll was perhaps the worst in the world: The city’s “cumulative mortality rate through December 2022 — at 496 deaths per 100,000 population — outstripped all 50 states and every country but Peru, the Russian Federation, Bulgaria and Hungary.”

Some of that was bad luck: We got hit early and proved extra-vulnerable thanks to high tourism and strong global commerce, heavy use of mass transit and the general crowding that almost defines New York City.

But, notes Hammond: “A well-functioning public health system should have foreseen such risks — and developed systems and backup plans to mitigate them — well before the threat emerged in Wuhan, China.”

After all, “Nearly every other city in the world — many of which faced the same disadvantages — managed the crisis better than New York.”

New York should have done better, but it’s not even learning the lessons of last time: We don’t have a blue-ribbon commission to do that. 

If the city and state don’t have better leadership (including competent public-health officials) in place before the next crisis, expect another disaster.