Legionnaires’ disease has been hitting New York City for over a decade; preventing it is completely straightforward — yet somehow City Hall can’t get the job done.
And so Gotham this summer suffered seven deaths plus 72 hospitalizations.
This year’s mess isn’t entirely on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s team: Institutional incompetence explains much of the city’s bungling release of information, and of the failure to prevent the outbreak in the first place.
Legionella — the bacteria that causes the deadly flu-like respiratory illness — is now endemic in the urban Northeast. It can infect the cooling towers atop buildings with air-conditioning systems, so city rules require full cleaning of every tower at least twice a year, along with monthly testing.
State law requires all tower owners to register, maintain, sample and disinfect them; if a tower shows elevated levels of the bug, they’re to notify local health departments and the public.
But enforcement is spotty, at best: New York City was well behind on its inspections as this summer began.
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And when belated checks got done after the outbreak, it turned out that nearly a quarter of buildings in the affected neighborhoods had no records of doing the required tests at all this year.
Right: The bug killed seven New Yorkers last year in Harlem, but the Health Department still didn’t have its act together in 2026, six months after Mamdani’s inauguration.
More bumbling: Per Council Speaker Julie Menin, city health officials only learned of the outbreak’s second fatality from news reports — and then refused to proactively order all cooling towers in the area disinfected.
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Throughout the outbreak, the Health Department proved unable or unwilling to share basic information about the number of cooling towers in the affected area, their testing histories and which ones were the source of the outbreak.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, meanwhile, sees all this as none of her affair: During last year’s outbreak, she told The Post that “responsibility and mitigation [of the outbreak] are solely within [NYC’s] purview.”
Brace yourself: We’re about to say something nice about ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Yes: During the 2016 Bronx outbreak, Cuomo provided free cooling-tower testing to all private building owners in the borough and across the state to quell growing fears; he also ordered the state public-health laboratory to help identify the source of the bacteria.
After the Harlem outbreak, Hochul actually said, “I don’t know how you prevent it”; Mamdani this year dismissed Speaker Menin’s complaints as “politics.”
Competent leaders would lean hard enough on the bureaucracies to ensure proper prevention, year after year, or at least to have solid protocols in place to move fast when we get another outbreak; count this as one more sign that New York lacks real leadership.
