Why Mamdanis team botched the deadly Legionnaires outbreak

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.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.Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Please provide a valid email.

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Throughout the outbreak, the Health Department proved unable or unwilling to share basic information about the number of ...