N.Y.C. Health Commissioner Resigns After Clashes With Mayor Over Virus

Some officials inside the health department talked about quitting that week, or staging a walkout to force action. Eventually, top officials and the mayor agreed on the need to lock down the city to stop the spread of the virus. Mr. de Blasio ordered schools closed on March 15.

Outside of the administration, some blamed Dr. Barbot for the delays and confusion, citing her shifting public statements on the virus from late January to early March. A few elected officials called for her to be fired in early April.

The turmoil at the top of the city’s health agency worsened in May over the mayor’s decision to locate the city’s contact-tracing efforts within its public hospital system and not in the health department.

Under Health + Hospitals, the city’s contact-tracing program got off to a rocky start. Lacking the capability to hire and manage 3,000 new workers, it outsourced much of the day-to-day management of the call center at the core of its operations to Optum, a billion-dollar subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group.

So far, fewer than half of New Yorkers who have tested positive for the coronavirus — some 20,000 people since the program began on June 1 — have shared their contacts.

“Right now, cases are popping up all over the place and we are not linking them to known contacts except in a small proportion of cases,” Dr. Neil Vora, the director of the trace effort, said at an internal town-hall-style meeting for tracers last month, a recording of which was provided to The Times.

Even with the new tracing program, the health department has been called on to handle more intricate aspects of so-called disease detective work, particularly in group settings like homeless shelters and nursing homes. That expanded to include restaurants and other social gatherings last month.

The mayor said on Friday that outbreaks in schools would also be handled by the health department, in coordination with the city’s new corps of contact tracers.

Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Otterman contributed reporting.