Former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett spoke to KDKA Radio's Larry Richert and Kevin Battle Friday morning and told them that he would have handled the COVID-19 pandemic differently than Governor Tom Wolf is handling it.
As a vaccine becomes available to the general public, Corbett reflected on the past 11 months and how he would have handled the pandemic from the beginning.
“This is an emergency. And we have an agency in Pennsylvania, in every county, the Emergency Management Agency (EMA), whether it’s Allegheny County’s EMA or Pennsylvania’s, which is PEMA. And my experience with emergencies is operated everything through PEMA to the Governor. The Governor sat, probably with the senior staff and with a lot of cabinet members who sat down to consult and should consult with them. And that’s what we did for non-health stuff, but we never had one that dealt with the health of everybody.”
While he acknowledges being a Monday morning quarter back, he then describes how he would have approached the initial shutdown.
“My position would have been different than Governor Wolf’s and I have said this repeatedly, publicly, where I would have run this there [EMA/PEMA], and not through the Department of Health, so that we could have taken a look at how do we balance those two," explained Corbett.
"Everybody’s afraid of this, and they’re absolutely right to be afraid of this, but there is an economy out there. My criticism, and a lot of people said this, back in March when they closed everything down they said we'll close it down but we're going to have waivers. They never explained how the waivers were going to work and as you know, the media reports - it was somewhat of a fiasco," he said.
Former Governor Corbett then moved on to the different industries affected by the shutdown, and described a conversation he had with Governor Wolf at the beginning of the outbreak about keeping the home building industry open, but that industry was shut down.
“People didn’t know what they were dealing with. I understand that, but you have got to get a handle on it as quickly as you can. We lost half of a construction season across Pennsylvania, in my mind, not only in home industry building, but in road building. These people would have been outside.”
At the end of the day, Corbett believes that these decisions need to be made based on the facts that are available.