COVID-19: NYC Quote of the Day 2020-08-04

Tuesday, August 4, 2020, NYC Mayor de Blasio - Hotels Used as Homeless Shelters and Quarantine Locations

Question: There's been discussion about residents of the Upper West Side being unhappy about hotels in their neighborhood being used as homeless shelters. A friend of mine stayed in a Midtown hotel and said he didn't feel safe going up and down the elevators or walking in the hall. Will the City make public a list of the hotels being used as homeless shelters and/or COVID quarantine locations, so that prospective hotel customers can know beforehand?

Mayor: I'm going to defer that question because I think there are some bigger issues there about privacy rights and what's the appropriate way to handle something like that from the individual point of view, from the business point of view, et cetera. But I do want to emphasize, we've had to do something on an emergency basis. It's a pandemic. It has caused massive dislocation. We had to get a lot of people out of shelters temporarily into hotels, to space people out and make sure they were safe. When this crisis is over – and it's a matter of months until there's a vaccine and the crisis is over – then we're going to bring people back into the shelter system out of those hotels, and a lot of things will start to change. But in the meantime, this is actually about protecting people's lives and safety.
Edited for redundancy, grammar, and emphasis
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