State of Emergence
LARRY HOGAN HAS GOT ANOTHER OF HIS ideas, and this one cracks him up. “I’m gonna call Pence!” says Hogan, startling his chief of staff, Matt Clark, who sits across a large, round faux-wood table. Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, is meeting with his coronavirus command team, a skeleton crew of state officials still reporting to the capitol in Annapolis. The conference rooms are all too narrow, so they are gathered in a cavernous event room, seated in alternate chairs to maintain social distancing. Hogan, a ruddy 63-year-old with jug-handle ears, has in front of him a dispenser of hand sanitizer, a can of Diet Coke and a starfish-shaped conference-call speaker.
The President, Hogan reminds the group, recently chided him for going around Vice President Mike Pence’s coronavirus task force to procure supplies. “Remember, Trump said, ‘He’s wasting his time. He should’ve just called Mike!’” He laughs a wheezy laugh. “So I’m gonna joke with him and say, ‘Hey, Mike, where’s my tests? The President said I should just call you!’ But then seriously say, ‘You both said we can use federal labs. When can we start?’”
“Right. Got it,” Clark says.
“I got a feeling they’re gonna backpedal on all that,” Hogan says.
Like every other governor in America, Hogan is dealing with a crisis for which there is no playbook. The team assembled here began its April 22 briefing on a somber note, as the state’s health secretary, Bobby Neall, read off the numbers: 14,775 total confirmed cases of COVID-19, up 582 from the day before; 631 deaths in the
